By Mallory McDuff
Charlotte Observer
August 05, 2010
Everybody’s doing it: Evangelicals, Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims. Prayer in response to 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 don’t believe in having believers as friends.
This national appeal to God may seem 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. 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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As an environmentalist, I pray that environmental organizations will view faith communities as serious allies for action. Such alliances have formed in my current hometown where North Carolina Interfaith Power and Light has partnered with a green jobs training program, Asheville GO, to involve congregations in weatherizing 300 low-income homes. 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 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 such as Martin Luther King used prayer to influence radical social change. Prayer provides the space for discernment, so we stay quiet long enough to open ourselves to the improbable.
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 waiting for us at St. Peter’s gates. Now let us pray.
Mallory McDuff, Ph.D., teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville and is the author of “Natural Saints: How People of Faith are Working to Save God’s Earth.”