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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Praying for our enemies
Funny how truths collide. In listening to one of my inside students last week speak about his difficulties with his work supervisor, I responded with a teaching that had a mere glimmer of a thread into a teaching I had once received.
He did not need to feel helpless. Nor did he need to turn to his habit of stoic resentments and stubborn justifications of his actions. He had some active, prayerful steps he could take. He could stay clean of resentments and judgments. He could activate his own connection with the spiritual support field. He could know deeply that they were both loved unconditionally by God.
Most importantly he could release, with his prayers and attitude, her (his supervisor’s) personal healing journey to the higher powers. Her work was her work. His work was his. They were bound together by the challenges of their relationship (the triggers and mirroring they were for each other); as well as the healing energy of God’s unconditional love and regard for them both. As his awareness was active in that larger energy of healing, it would support (without obligating) her participation in the same field. Invite the healing for himself. Invite the healing for her. Then watch for Grace, listen and follow.
Today, as I am combing my journals for poems, watching the rain fall quietly outside my window, I find the same teaching in my own journal. In 2005 I had been reading Walter Wink’s Powers that Be (p111). He wrote of how praying for your enemies submits them to a power greater than their oppression of you. This does not deny their power to enact injustice, but proclaims a greater overarching power of justice to which both sufferer and oppressor can turn to for inspiration, salvation and forgiveness. This style of prayer calls upon the “angel” of the oppressor to accountability of Divine Truth.
Then a few pages later on Valentines Day I wrote: The key to freedom is meeting oppression with love. Not escaping oppression by rejecting or fleeing, but engaging oppression with the dynamic of love.
In the prison system all kinds of us/them relationships exist. Staff, inmates, and guards see their lives and actions as negatively defined by those around them. Everyone suffers, everyone oppresses. Another way can open!
May all of the potential facets of this diamond in the rough learn how to pray for the light to shine through themselves and each other. For surely the potential is there for the friction to merely be the hands of the Holy chiseling out a diamond.
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