Worry is in my DNA. I’ve endured a life-long struggle to live in the moment and accept life as it is, as it happens. Paralyzing worry has been one of the greatest catalysts for me to pray.

Worry was the reason I began praying a Novena for Peace. It all started after the terrible events of 9/11/2001. I noticed that as a nation, we’d moved too quickly from shock and grief to anger and revenge. We didn’t even wait for the shock to wear off so that we could begin processing our overwhelming grief before we went on the attack.

So here we are, 18 years later, still embroiled in wars in foreign lands. The death and destruction we inflict in those lands then returns to us soldiers maimed in body and soul. In those same 18 years, criminal behaviors in the banking industry, causing untold damage to individuals and economies world-wide, went unpunished. Criminal sexual behavior by clergy and other trusted leaders wreaked havoc in churches, schools, and other places children were supposed to be safe. It would seem that immoral behavior became the norm; no place truly safe.

Does God hear us at all when we pray?

Yet maybe these years say more about us than God. Maybe in either a direct or indirect way, our response to relieve the intense discomfort of grief with all-too-familiar anger has something to do with some of the other disquieting events that have occurred. Maybe we shifted something essential in our nature as a country that opened a Pandora’s box of consequences. And maybe to find our way back requires that we sit in the intense discomfort of awakening that prayer can evoke.

Yet I know God is listening to our prayers. In these same disquieting 18 years, new ideas in science, business, religion, and politics sprouted movements that challenge our dualist thinking and ideas of separateness. New thought leaders espouse a different and more holistic way of being in the world. Loving, ethical people endeavor in all walks of life. The sun continues to shine, the rain continues to fall, the earth continues to bless us with beauty and abundance.

I guess it depends on where you look to see if God is answering our prayers for peace.

Personally, I am happy to report that it took me only five decades of prayer to begin to worry less. Now in my sixth decade I can look back and see what a waste of time all that worry had been.

Reflection

The full list of questions for meditation and reflection are in the Novena for Peace Ritual, Questions, & Prayers post.

Today I suggest we use the poem, Patient Trust below written by the Jesuit priest and physicist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to reflect on our ability to be in the world as it is but have trust that all will be well if we do the most loving thing in each moment of our day.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time,
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.