By Mallory McDuff
The Bellingham Herald
August 11, 2010
Here in Washington state, everybody’s doing it: Evangelicals, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. Prayer in response to the environment and the oil spill has become a form of social action for creation. If you haven’t been invited to a prayer vigil in the past 100 days, perhaps you haven’t checked your Facebook page or you are don’t believe in having believers as friends.
This national appeal to God may have seemed like a naïve cry for help in an overwhelming situation. But the groundswell of prayer has become a collective spiritual response to a national ecological crisis.
The hundreds of thousands of hands joined together in prayer – literally from sea to shining sea – reflect a growing and united religious environmental movement that has a strong base here in Washington State through the organizations Earth Ministry and Washington Interfaith Power and Light.
As one initiative, the environmental groups have coordinated a series of climate and coal meetings across the state between legislators and the religious community. Recently, for example, they met with a Lutheran Bishop and a U.S. Representative in Tacoma.
If people of faith and environmentalists can harness this momentum, at a time when every household in the country is bearing witness to the oil spill, their power could be transformative.
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For the past three months, I have repeated a prayer in response to the oil spill that is taped on my fridge. Now I am ready to fall to my knees with a new prayer for action, advocacy, and reflection that could transform our relationship with the earth. This prayer for the future stems from my deep grief over the violation of a place – the Alabama Gulf Coast – where I feel closest to God.
As an environmentalist, I pray that environmental organizations will view faith communities as serious allies for action. Such alliances have formed in the Pacific Northwest, where Washington Interfaith Power and Light has partnered with groups such as Earth Justice and the NW Energy Coalition in a campaign to move the state beyond coal by 2015. Across the country, people of faith are holding carbon fasts during Lent and installing solar panels on churches based on a moral imperative for justice and care of creation.
As a mother, I pray that this partnership results in powerful lobbying for public policy that supports healthy communities for my children’s future. Such legislative success is evident in the work of Earth Ministry and the Environmental Priorities Coalition, a network of 25 environmental groups in Washington State that advocates for environmental legislation. As the only faith-based organization in the network, Earth Ministry provides advocacy training for people of faith to lobby for issues like clean water, green jobs, and renewable energy.
As a Christian, I pray that reflection and prayer become strategies for a new environmental movement that inspires hope in the midst of uncertainty. Religious leaders like Martin Luther King used prayer to influence radical social change in our country. Prayer provides the space for discernment, so we stay quiet long enough to open ourselves to the improbable. We need that space to confront not only the devastating impacts of the oil spill, but also the long-term reality of climate change.
Theologian Karl Barth said “to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder in the world.” The kingdom of heaven is now, not pie in the sky, waiting for us at St. Peter’s gates. Now let us pray.
Mallory McDuff, Ph.D. is the author of “Natural Saints: How People of Faith are Working to Save God’s Earth.” She teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC but spends time in every summer in Mount Vernon.