I’ve always had a little bit of mixed feelings about the National Prayer Breakfast, which this year was held this morning just a stone’s throw from the White House at the Washington Hilton. In a country that needs to pray more, we give speeches about it.
That said, there have been some wonderful graces there. Think Mother Teresa in 1994. During that address, he said in front of God and man and Bill Clinton and Al Gore:
I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion. Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on.
Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today – abortion which brings people to such blindness.
Of course, Peggy Noonan memorably wrote about that prayer breakfast — and how the woman sitting next to her wrote a grocery list as the saint said some of these things. But it happened. And choosing not to listen while pretending to profess certain things has consequences. (For all of us, of whatever party or candidate – or none of the above.) To the extent that our blindness is willful, God help us.
This morning, as some others before him, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan made good use of the time. He pushed back on the idea that prayer isn’t action.
You’ll remember the Daily News cover, of course. Full disclosure: I actually think it was a little bit of a mirror for believers: Do we really pray or do we just give it lip service (including in an annual Washington establishment breakfast)? Prayer is not meant to be a platitude. It is for encounter and relationship with God. It means something. Prayer is a power we have that we don’t always use, relying on ourselves and forgetting to give praise and glory to God, and truly trust Him with our lives — and His grand plan.
My response to the Daily News cover was to try to pray more.
That said, we obviously live in a culture that tends to think of prayer as a crutch, as a matter of nostalgia, as a nice thing to do or say, but not our lifeblood.
So it was a great blessing to hear Paul Ryan push back against that.
He said:
I have noticed a growing impatience with prayer in our culture. You see it in the papers or on Twitter. When people say they’re praying for someone or something, the attitude in some quarters seems to be, “Don’t just pray; do something about it.” But the thing is, when you are praying, you are doing something about it. You are revealing the presence of God. Whenever people are in grief or even when they’re about to start a great undertaking, they feel the worst pain of all: They feel alone. How am I going to get through this? Why is this happening to me? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That is why there is nothing more comforting—or more humbling, really—than to hear someone say, “I’m praying for you.” Because when hear you that, you realize, you’re not alone. God is there. And hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people are all speaking to Him on your behalf. They’re not praying for some abstract notion. They’re praying for you the person. It says a lot about our country that people of both parties—and all faiths—will drop everything and pray for their fellow Americans. What it says is, we believe in the dignity of the individual. And that is why prayer should always come first.
All Americans believe this. But as Christians, we especially can appreciate this truth. We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe God came down from heaven and became a man—with a name and a body—so we could know him. We could begin to understand. He walked among the poor and lowly of this world so he could raise us to new heights in the next. It is a miracle. It inspires us every day. And that is why we should “rejoice always”; “pray without ceasing”; and “in all circumstances, give thanks.”
After saying a word about “the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.”
I want to welcome all of you to Washington. You could not have come for a better reason. This breakfast is a national tradition because prayer is a part of our national heritage. It all goes back to the Declaration of Independence. We believe our rights come from God, and our job, as officeholders, is to protect those rights. So it is only natural we should ask for His guidance as we seek to do His will.
If you’re frustrated about politics today — or anything else — pray. Unceasingly — on our knees and with the offering our very lives.
National Prayer Breakfast -- Washington Should Listen to Paul