Taking the Middle Path Outside Church Walls

This Thursday, I'm going to do something that makes me uncomfortable even thinking about: I'm going to an ecumenical prayer service outside church walls. It's the National Collegiate Day of Prayer on the campus of Western Washington University.

I'm uncomfortable about this for several reasons. Personally, I am not a fan of extemporaneous prayer, particularly when led by strangers, because I don't know what direction they're going to take. I am certain that there will be people with whom I have profound political and philosophical differences; will they pray for real world outcomes that I do not want to see? Or what if someone gets going and doesn't know when to stop, or continuously stammers “and we just pray that...” as a pious variant of “um”? Trust me, those things are going to happen.

But I also see it as an opportunity to interact with people of different faith traditions and, this being the Pacific Northwest, people of no faith tradition at all. We (Episcopal Campus Ministries, from St. Paul's Bellingham) have an hour to lead prayers, and I hope we will do our best to show people who may not be familiar with the Episcopal Church how inclusive and relevant our structured worship can be. We're going to use An Order of Service for Noonday from the Book of Common Prayer.

One of our strengths as a liturgical church is the focus on worship as central to our identity. The prayers in the BCP have been written very, very carefully so that people can pray them together even while holding different ideas of what they may mean, or hoping for different outcomes. This is no accident. In the formative years of the Church of England, people were killing each other over their religious differences. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Parliament passed a series of statutes on religion that came to be known as the Elizabethan Settlement (cf. http://library.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/elizabethan-settlement ). The Elizabethan Settlement was the starting point of the Anglican via media or “middle path” that the Episcopal Church strives for to this day. While technically Protestant, we retained much from the Roman Catholic church. In many respects, our liturgy and vestments are practically indistinguishable from those in a Roman mass. The via media gives us tremendous room to include people with divergent, even opposite, perspectives on religious and human issues.

We live in interesting times. There are numerous social, economic, and political issues that divide us. It is my opinion that only by putting God first can we resolve them in a just way. I think people of any faith would agree with that. Ah, but what does it mean? What I think it means and what you think it means may not be the same. That's why our carefully written prayer book is so valuable. Our liturgy seeks to keep us focused on God during worship, not on ourselves. Or, as a friend of mine (and budding Episcopalian) puts it, when we participate in the liturgy we let go of our egos and accept others as ourselves.

My goal for Thursday's noon prayer is for everyone to feel closer to God, regardless of theology, political philosophy, or conflicting positions on the issues of our times.

The Lord be with you,
Brad