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interfaith prayer
A couple weeks ago I wrote about a local group that was trying to organize some interfaith prayer services. They wanted to add a Jew to their group, they contacted my rabbi, and he sent me. The organizational meeting was tonight.
On the positive side, my worries that they were trying to build a new kind of service that would be acceptable to all faiths -- that is, so watered-down as to be pretty close to meaningless -- were unnecessary. They don't want that. They talked briefly about the idea of multi-faith services -- multi-, not inter-, because you have aspects of everyone's, sort of taking turns perhaps. And they said they aren't trying to do that either.
So what are they trying to do? It sounds like they are trying for dialogue -- not formal educcation so much, but a chance for people of different religions to get together and compare ideas. The educational aspect is something I had suggested to the organizer before; she was cool to the idea when I suggested it but seemed more interested tonight.
They want to do it at least partially in the context of prayer, which came across as a little odd. They seem to mean by this silent prayer or meditation, which has the advantage of being inoffensive. For the upcoming gathering, they are thinking in terms of an introductory prayer (from the leader??), opening comments, some silent prayer on the topic they just described, and then discussion. And I think some form of closing prayer, if I recall correctly.
Digression #1: Many of the Christians I've met, including all the ones in that room, take the approach that spontaneous prayer is good and one should just pray on demand or at will. This isn't really how it works in Judaism, though, and that may be weirding me out. We say blessings all the time -- around food, when having certain experiences (like seeing a rainbow), when we get up in the morning ("thanks for making all the parts work"), even after using the restroom. That's all in addition to the fixed prayers, the thrice-daily services. Those services have time built in for personal petitionary prayer. While there's nothing really wrong with making such prayers at other times as well, it's not the norm. I mean, most petitions can wait a few hours, and the ones that can't are ones you can't plan for 3pm Sunday at the community gathering anyway. :-)
Digression #2: It is helpful to clarify why we pray. I think there are four reasons: to praise, to petition, to thank, and to fulfill obligations. The last doesn't apply to spontaneous prayer. Petitioning has a place within the fixed prayer, so absent emergencies ("please help me avoid that tractor-trailer that just cut me off!") it doesn't really fit with spontaneous prayer. That leaves praise and thanks -- both fine things that we could probably all stand to do more of, but maybe not what's on the minds of the folks who suggest we take a moment for silent prayer. Eh, whatever.
Ok, anyway... so they're planning something that's part vague prayer, part dialogue, and while some of what they're saying feels a little touchy-feely and newagy to me, there's nothing really glaringly problematic in the plans. This could work.
So why do I sound so hesitant? Because, simply put, these people couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag with maps from AAA and three lifeline phone calls. :-)
Five minutes into the meeting I had what turned out to be an accurate read on the group. The organizer isn't very organized, and boy does she love to talk. She had an agenda but didn't follow it. She kept saying things like "I meant to bring such-and-such but I forgot". Her idea of publicizing events is to personally call everyone who showed up at the last one (a couple dozen people), which does nothing to reach new people. (Note that the one we were planning tonight is in a week and a half.) She didn't have an answer for people who asked how long a gathering we were looking at. She ran tonight's meeting very haphazardly, and I left at the two-hour mark without apologies. (I was being polite; that's why I hung around.)
All of the people there seemed to be very nice -- no issues there. The meeting organizer (and host) had prepared food (I left before it got served). Collectively, though, this is not a group that I believe is capable of sustaining, let alone building, an interfaith community of this sort. I'd be happy to be wrong about that, but I'm not going to join them. Life is too short to spend it on disorganized organizations.
There were, by the way, six people there tonight -- not a large group. There was one Quaker, one Bahi (sp?), me, and three unspecified Christians -- though two of them frequently referred to "Father so-and-so" (different names), so that probably means some flavor of Catholic. We did not, for the most part, talk about what we believed, which disappointed me; I guess the idea is that we would do that at the service. From comments here and thee I gather that the Bahi doesn't have a specific God-concept; it sounded like he believes that God is the universe, or something like that. I don't know if that's typical of his faith. The Quaker said almost nothing the entire night. Most of my own contributions were in the form of "clarifying" questions, ranging from "what's our current agenda item?" to the education-versus-worship thing.
The title of this next gathering is, after some negotiation, "the mystery of prayer". (I asked: is prayer mysterious?) This morphed into a set of bullet points (that actually came from my own off-the-cuff comments): why do we pray? what do we pray for? what outcome do we expect?
This might be interesting to attend, but that's going to be the extent of my own involvement in this. I'll call my rabbi tomorrow to report back. Maybe someone from our "outreach" (i.e. interfaith) committee would be interested in helping them, and have the patience to do so. But I think I can safely judge this to be outside the domain of the worship committee.
I believe I was unfailingly dipomatic and polite tonight. The organizer will probably be surprised when I tell her that I'm not going to be joining their planning group, because I did make contributions tonight. But that was because I was there anyway; that doesn't mean I'm going to seek out future opportunies to attend their meetings. (If they were conducting discussions via email I'd probably join that, because I could skim in three minutes what took an hour to say in a meeting. But they're not all email-enabled, and the organizer specifically is not. So I can't help them via that channel.)
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Completely agreed. I have seen people who were trying to be careful slip up on stuff like this -- and most attendees are probably not going to be trying to be that careful, because it won't occur to them to be. If they're going to open and close these sessions with verbal prayer, I really hope they compose it in advance.
This group apparently has a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Buddhist involved, none of whom were there last night. I wonder if they "have" these people in the same sense that they currently "have" a Jew, or if they're more involved.