Let us Pray ...

 

In a town where the majority of citizens self-declare as adherents of a Christian faith, elections would logically result in a municipal council reflecting that. I can understand that given the onerous responsibility of running the community’s civic affairs, some council member might suggest that they begin each council meeting with a prayer for divine guidance. The deity addressed, of course, would be the Holy Trinity of Christian faith, not the Creator/Mother Earth of indigenous spirituality, not Buddha, Mohammed or Jehovah, and definitely not the humanist spirit of some agnostic/atheistic, not-Christian conviction.

Protests were inevitable when a municipal council in Fundy Albert, New Brunswick added a mandatory opening prayer to its deliberations. As predictable was its subsequent withdrawal of the prayer protocol in favour of a five-minute period of quiet contemplation before meetings. You just can’t get away with mixing church and civic affairs anymore, unless you live in one of the world’s few theocracies.

But, this isn’t a new thing. Some of us grew up with a centuries-old legacy of Mennonite religious culture. Driven in part by a kind of pacifism, a commitment to gospel discipleship and piety, my ancestors, for instance, lived through many generations in self-governing colonies in Europe. Their self-management demanded both a civic and a religious administration, and deciding which of those was ultimately authoritative was enough to cause groups to break away and start new, more “churchy” colonies. Even so, the conundrum of what’s religious and what’s secular would simply start all over again, clear when surveying the bounds of a farmer’s pasture, not so clear when a Mennonite church member was charged with assault by a Russian servant.

The wearing of traditional, religious garb and symbols while working inside a secular administration is a current affair with opposing, strongly held opinions. At the extreme, a man in the full regalia of a Catholic Cardinal issuing passports in a Service Canada office would clearly muddy the divide between church and state, but a woman working in a high school cafeteria and wearing a headscarf, well, not so much. We go far too easily and quickly from the idealistic to the absurd.

Complicating the issue for Christians in Canada, seems to me, is the fact that the numbers of citizens thinking about social issues secularly far exceeds those who take their cues from religious belief. It’s easy to jump from the statistics to the conviction that Christianity is under siege and in danger of irrelevancy. Removing the Lord’s Prayer from public schools under this circumstance is seen as yet another attack on “the Christian Nation.”

Perhaps the idea of a time of prayer before beginning municipal council meetings is sound. Maybe, getting focused each time on the nature of my neighbourhood and my part in it would lead to better debate, more generous listening, sounder decisions. Could it ever take the form of intoning a Christian prayer one month? A Cree smudging next month? A Rabbinic Prayer for the Country next?

Perhaps Fundy Albert got it right, in the end. Five minutes of silent contemplation, a space for each to invoke the spirit of their task in his/her own way. For most, probably, a Christian prayer ending something like, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Amen