Answering Flood Waters with Public Prayer

Pastors and congregations dealing with weather disasters may be inspired by the public prayer healing and listening work of churches in rural Appalachia to help people heal. This comes from Roman Catholic priest, John S. Rausch, in the latest issue of Liturgy which offers the full essay (including more examples of public prayer) at tandfonline.com with a subscription.

Let this serve as a window into what might be done in your neighborhood.

Public prayer is the salve for society’s wounds. After mass shootings, airplane crashes, and natural disasters, communities gather with lighted candles or tolling bells to comfort one another and probe the deeper significance of the tragedy. While Appalachia has its share of these human and natural disasters, certain structural patterns in the region, especially associated with its physical resources, set an additional context for prayer to hear the cries of the poor and respond to the silent screams of vulnerable creation. .  

 Flooding in Appalachia differs from floods of the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers that put thousands of acres of farmland under water. Typically, the steep mountains of central Appalachia collect the downpour from several inches of rain in a few hours, gush flash floods in the hollows, and swell creeks in the valleys. The aftermath of flooding everywhere, however, remains the same: possible loss of life and destruction of property. Spiritually, people experience grief, depression, and despair that beg a response. 

 In spring 2003, after a devastating flood in the tiny coal camp of McRoberts, Kentucky, a group of twenty-five church leaders and parishioners listened to people’s stories and planted flowers. We bought flats of begonias, petunias, and marigolds from a sheltered workshop to transplant throughout the town. 

 Rev. Steve Peake, pastor of the Corinth Baptist Church in the nearby town of Fleming-Neon and part of our public prayer leadership team, allowed his presence to lift spirits and remind residents to renew their hope in God’s providence. Standing by a row of framed houses on Highway 343, he said, “Every time I drive by, I think of people pushing brooms and shoveling mud out of their homes.” 

 Like pilgrims, we visited private dwellings, churches, and public buildings, and heard about the flood from traumatized residents. We said a prayer, then planted a flower to express compassion and to replace ugliness with beauty, death with resurrection. In the midst of a small garden by one house, a plaque read: “The earth laughs in flowers.” Standing by that sign, Sister Rosalyn said a prayer, and then Spencer, age seven, planted a begonia.  

 Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, encourages a deeper respect for “our common home,” and the conviction that everything in the world is connected (LS #138). Referring to St. Francis of Assisi, the pope stresses how relationally the saint dealt with all reality: “He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace” (LS #10). The interdependence of all these aspects underlying the social order exemplifies the richness of public prayer because it calls forth authentic community, confronts the structures of social sin, and reminds participants they form part of the body of Christ.
 

John S. Rausch, a Catholic priest and member of the Glenmary Home Missioners of America, lives in Stanton, Kentucky. He has ministered in social justice for over forty years in Appalachia.

John S. Rausch, “The Earth Laughs in Flowers: Public Prayer in Appalachia,” Liturgy 32, no. 4 (2017): 11-19.

Earth’s Water and Baptismal Implications

Again, as with our posting on March 3, we take from Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016) some of Peter McGrail’s essay on environmental issues related to Christian Initiation. McGrail’s essay deals with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on the environment. Here is his analysis of how water, jeopardized by environmental degradation, may be seen through the lens of the incarnation.

As soon as we draw on Pope Francis’ consideration of water, that element’s potential symbolic ambiguity becomes evident. His primary concern is access to fresh drinking water, which he underscores as “a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water because they are denied the right to a life consistent to their unalienable dignity” (no. 30). The use and misuse of water serves as a potent reality that points up global inequality. . . 

 This reality of exclusion contrasts with the lavish exuberance with which the gift of water is celebrated in the Easter Vigil. For example, the fifth reading opens with the cry of invitation, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Is 55:1, NRSV) and closes with the comparison of the efficaciousness of God’s life-giving word to the life-giving winter rain and snow (Is 55:10–11). Water is portrayed here as a freely given gift from the heavens that satisfies a thirsty humanity and brings fruitfulness to creation. So lavish, so fruitful is it that it serves as an image for God’s word, God’s very will. 

 In the light of Laudato Si’, we are invited to ask what it might mean to proclaim those words in a location of desertification or to hear them as a member of a community with little or no access to clean drinking water. The words may, indeed, express profound hope in such contexts, but perhaps they do so precisely because they also tie into anxieties, evoke painful memories, and reflect present realities. The ambiguities of a symbol soiled by human activity interact subversively with the liturgical proclamation of a scriptural passage such as this. And the tensions thus set up have the potential to generate dissonance on the lips of assemblies in a more affluent part of the world. . . Thus, one of the most joyous sections of the Easter Vigil can plunge us into a discomforting recognition of the meanings that our core symbol of baptism can hold in tension. 

 What, then, does this say to us of baptism itself? Surely there must be more going on here at the level of sign than just an immersion into a compromised symbol of pollution. . . . 

McGrail calls for a careful reading of the Pope’s concern for Earth’s gifts so that we appropriately locate the incarnation of Christ in the midst of both sacraments and creation. We benefit from knowing more deeply the key relationship of the paschal mystery to God-with-us in this finite world and its fulfillment eschatologically.

The renewal of humanity, and indeed the transformation of the whole of creation, is caught up in the dynamism of Christ’s own victory over death and the captivity of the material world to decay and destruction. Baptism is a plunging into Christ’s paschal mystery by which women and men “die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 6). In celebrating baptism, therefore, we are indeed and necessarily acknowledging the extent to which the material world is caught up in systems of death, but are also proclaiming and celebrating union with Christ in his transforming death and resurrection.

Peter McGrail is a priest of the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and is head of the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Peter McGrail, “Initiation and Ecology: Becoming a Christian in the Light of Laudato Si’,” Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016), 55-62.

Sacraments and Ecology

Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016) is devoted to issues involving Christian Initiation. Peter McGrail’s essay deals with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on the environment. Here is the introduction to McGrail’s analysis of the Pope’s focus on caring for Earth as it addresses liturgical matters.

Fifty years on from Vatican II, the lack of any sustained consideration of the environment in its various constitutions, decrees, and declarations is striking. For example, half of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World was devoted to detailed consideration of “more urgent problems” – yet the environment was not ranked among them. (See http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html)
 

The Council Fathers were reflecting the preoccupations of their time. In the intervening half-century, global perspectives on the issue have changed; today environmental concerns form an arena for passionate political, economic, and scientific debate.
 

 Not surprisingly, therefore, Pope Francis’s second encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home” (http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html) has provoked strong and disparate responses. Many Catholics have received it as a timely challenge to review their own priorities and practices. From other quarters the complaint is heard that the Pope has overstepped his legitimate remit by pronouncing on highly disputed interpretations of economic science or by closing down debate as to what responsibility (if any) should be assigned to human beings in the processes of global warming. That the letter should have catalyzed such strong, and at times vehement, responses is hardly surprising; it is difficult to avoid the impression that Pope Francis sets out to be challenging.

 

While the challenge posed by Laudato Si’ to politicians, economists, and diocesan sustainability planners is pretty self-evident, the letter addresses wider audiences, including those responsible for catechumens. At first sight the letter provides food for thought to be explored during the catechumenate period; for example, chapters 4 (“Integral Ecology”) and 6 (“Ecological Education and Spirituality”) offer particularly rich possibilities for catechetical use along the journey of conversion. Laudato Si’, however, also implies (rather than directly raises) questions of a more mystagogical nature. In focusing our attention on humanity’s dependence upon “our Sister, Mother Earth” (no. 1) for the sustenance of life, the letter challenges us to recognize that we depend upon the same mother for the material symbols that we use in initiating men and women into the Christian life—the water, oil, bread, and wine that articulate the catechumenal process.
 

It is of the nature of symbols to combine—sometimes ambiguously—very different fields of meaning. A careful reading of the letter through a liturgical lens can prompt us to expand our awareness of the fields of meaning operative in the symbols of initiation to include the ecological. This, in turn, gives rise to questions. How, for example, can we presume to immerse the elect in the baptismal bath, anoint them with consecrated oil, or invite them to the table of the Eucharist, without recognizing that the natural signs we use can speak also of the poisoning of the natural world, of unequal access to healthy drinking water, and the social impact of consumption? Can we lead our neophytes forward from the Mysteries without having explored these ambiguities with them? Can we ignore sacramental ecology?

  

Peter McGrail is a priest of the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and is head of the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Peter McGrail, “Initiation and Ecology: Becoming a Christian in the Light of Laudato Si’,” Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016), 55-62.