Pray for Yourself

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. —Philippians 4:6, NRSV

On Tuesday morning, a few hundred people from various Christian traditions gathered in Washington, D.C., at Upper Senate Park: Baptists and Methodists, Franciscans and Jesuits, Episcopalians and United Church of Christ folk. It was an intergenerational, multi-racial mix of queer and straight clergy and laity from across the country, all together in one place just two days after Pentecost. The vigil, coordinated by Sojourners, the “Christian organization dedicated to social justice, peace, and faith-driven activism,” had been organized to oppose a reconciliation bill being considered in Congress that, if passed, would harm millions of the most vulnerable people in the United States with draconian cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And the event was was appropriately called “A Pentecost for a Moral Budget.”

At the vigil, Scripture was read, songs were sung, speeches were given, and prayers were prayed. In true Pentecost fashion, the Spirit was moving and the people were fired up. We kept on singing as we marched from the park to the Senate steps. There we gathered to hear more speeches from a handful of senators, interspersed with prayer after prayer after prayer after prayer.

We prayed for our vulnerable neighbors. We prayed for the hungry. We prayed for the poor. We prayed for those crying out for help whose voices could not be heard. We prayed for our representatives. We prayed and prayed and prayed for people and for causes and for the arc of the moral universe to bend toward justice quickly. Someone told me, “This is more prayers than I’ve ever heard.”

But then, the last speaker for the event, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, approached the podium on those Senate steps. And she held up her hand, closed her eyes, and said, “Finally, we pray for ourselves.” The words were a jolt to my head and heart. All that praying for so many people and so many things, all those people of faith gathered, trying to do God’s will, and we hadn’t prayed for us.

Bishop Budde said, “We pray that we may never lose hope, that we may never lose faith, and that we may never give up on love.”

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that “now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.” God is love. And on that sure foundation, our hope and our faith find their footing. And on that support, we carry out the work that God calls us to carry into the world.

Our culture is so hyper-individualized that people of faith, trying to maintain the integrity of being humble and selfless, might assume that praying for oneself is hypocritical. But if the greatest command is to love God fully, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself, shouldn’t you pray for yourself? I mean, what if withholding prayers for hope, faith, and love from ourselves keeps the very ones we are trying to help from having the hope they need to see tomorrow, the faith they need to carry on, and the love they need to know that they matter, and that they are not alone?

So, Beloved, as you pray for justice and joy, as you pray for the world, as you pray for your neighbor, be sure to also pray for yourself.