Prayer & people

...If one falls, the other can help him up...

...We need to know where we are, who we are, to acknowledge the sovereignty of God, to know that we are spiritual as well as physical beings...

...How is the thirst for a true spirituality, a common spirituality, to be authentically met...

...Life for a congressman was not full of the wild parties he had read about in the sensational revelations of Rita Jenrette, wife of the ill-fated former congressman...

...Senator Domenici is a Catholic...

...The prayer group restores community...

...The new individualism - despair and meaninglessness are the problems of many an individual today, for example - and "what am I as a person...

...For example, the Protestant starts exis-tentially and not from a religious principle, wrote Kilian McDonnell, OSB, for an ecumenical conference on spiritual life some years ago...

...He should know that what he can bring to it is his traditional sense of the sacred and thus prevent his group from falling into a piety which is not much more than a humanism expressed in a biblical vocabulary...

...I think the same thing could probably be said of some Catholic charismatic groups...

...To answer that question institutes and centers of spirituality have sprung up around the country...

...Spirituality is approached as the deepest reality in the life of persons and psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the history of religion as resources which can contribute to it...

...The considerations are many, but the application should be simple: a spiritual life in common which enables persons to cope with each day as believers...

...The first three are Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist respectively...

...One such prayer group of long standing includes liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, Senator Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, also a Democrat, and Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican...

...Leaders seek it...

...At best, however, they embody a serious common effort to confront the tasks of every day in the light of the Gospel.' 'I think of myself as a good Catholic," said a Senate wife who belongs to a prayer group, "and I get spiritual sustenance from Mass and the sacraments, but very little of what I hear on Sunday helps me to live the life I must lead...

...It is roughly estimated that of the members of more than fifty groups associated with a suburban Protestant church at least half are Catholics who live in the neighborhood...

...Their community of prayer was the source of their remarkable vitality and strength...

...These men are not eccentrics of the right and new on the scene but men of some stature in the Senate and respected by both their peers and the press...

...The need is, in Mark Hatfield's words, to know "where we are between Sundays": "We are the church dispersed in the world...

...At the best of these there is an effort to draw from the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish experience...

...I see a great difference between now and ten or twenty years ago...

...It is a place where I can be vulnerable, dependent, open...

...And not all of them are members of the New Right or inspired by the Moral Majority...

...Yet prayer life and liturgy often presuppose only incorporation in the parish-often the most tenuous of identifications-and the family...

...so do the people...

...The first invitation he himself had received was to a prayer breakfast...

...is an innate query for most people...

...Why do they belong to a prayer group...

...Association with others in a common effort is strengthening...

...At worst these groups can be centers of self-righteousness and narrow literal interpretations of the Bible...

...Differences are explored for the lesson to be learned...

...In consequence he is equipped "to hear more readily God speaking with the voice of the secular world...

...the Catholic ties the Spirit to sacred places, sacred persons, and sacred actions...

...The associations may be shallow but they demand energy and condition thought and action...

...Unfortunately most of the groups hold themselves aloof from the world and tend to sit in judgment...

...It is, in truth, a little reported fact but on any given day here in the nation's capital there are probably as many congressmen meeting in prayer groups as there are partying...

...As the tension and anxiety with which we live mounts, as we have a greater perception of living on the edge of the abyss of nuclear holocaust, we have a greater need to live in the light of the ultimate truth...

...The conservatives have been much quicker to sense the need and to try to fill it than have the mainline churches," admits one Protestant pastor...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy PRAYER & PEOPLE MORE CONGRESSMEN ARE PRAYING THAN PARTYING THE DELEGATE from United States Samoa - new to the House of Representatives - was humorously describing his discoveries...

...Two are stronger than one...

...If I had wanted dogma I would have stayed where I was," said a former Catholic who sampled one of these...

...Yet I have a significant number of Jewish friends who gather in similar groups to reflect on the scriptures, and many Catholics are members of the groups originally of Protestant origin...

...We face a new universe, a new individual, a new statement of the Gospel, new corporateness, new liberty of opinion and action...

...He adds, "We live in an age of disconnectedness...

...People praying today do so in a different environment than in the past, said John Oliver Nelson, director of Kirk-ridge, the Presbyterian retreat center, at the same conference...

...It is God in the secular world that a Catholic finds in an ecumenical prayer group...

...As a unit of community, it not only fills my need but that of society...

...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...

...The multiplying of prayer groups is in part, a response to this need...

...He is less apt to identify the sacred with the ecclesiastical, and he is less inclined to dismiss the purely secular as without religious value . . .is readier to meet and greet the Spirit where he moves and manifests himself...

...Sociologists talk about the loss of community as a common factor in our American culture...

...The new corporateness-"We are closer by television to multitudes of people than most of our ancestors were to anyone outside their household . . . millions of people . . . have real identification with lodge, congregation, service club, fraternity or sorority, political grouping, P.T.A., credit union, labor organization, management, etc...

...In the Washington area, at least, the prayer group is a Protestant phenomenon, in that most of the groups develop out of Protestant congregations or in connection with Protestant movements like the Campus Crusade...

...Groups may provide community but do not overflow in charity - as yet...

...So far the great number of prayer groups and Bible study groups are more a demonstration of a need than anything else...

...Historically," says Senator Hat-field, "we have the example of the people of the apostolic church living under the extraordinary strains of beginnings and of persecution...

...in prayer groups we affirm our Christian identity across denominational lines...