When you're asked to co-host a prayer vigil, so long as you don't offer a prayer

As a response to the Christchurch mosque shooting, our church was approached by the Catholic Archdiocese to co-host an Interfaith Service of Prayer at the city Cathedral.

Under the circumstances, this is not something you say no to, regardless of public media stoushes you may have had with the Archbishop, who would be leading this service. Time to put away such differences in the spirit of interfaith harmony, meeting on values everyone from Wiccans to wild-eyed dervishes can agree on: murder is bad, religious bigotry is bad, our faith divisions are deeply to be regretted and overcome.

Just because something keeps happening, doesn't mean you get to stop regretting it.

The advert, as you see, has every religious symbol imaginable on it, including the UUA flaming chalice. One spiritual tree: many fruits. Religious pluralism in a nutshell. So, as I say, we agreed to co-host (without quite knowing what that meant) and I wrote this prayer to offer along with all the other faith traditions:

Interfaith Peace Vigil Prayer

St. Francis Xavier Cathedral

24/3/19

(based on a prayer by Sister Joan Chitister)

As we come together today, reaching across our many faith traditions, in human kinship, let us pray:

Great spirit of life, known by 99 names and many more names, yet beyond all naming, known in many ways, yet beyond our knowing:

may our prayers today call your eternal and limitless presence more fully into our awareness, that you may search our souls and lift from them any vengeful reflexes, any lingering lizard-like urge to hurt by word or by deed as we have been hurt by deeds and by words, to punish as we have been punished, to terrorize as we have been terrorized,
in that presence and awareness, may we find in ourselves the strength to listen rather than to judge, the strength to trust rather than to fear, the strength to try again and again to make peace in a world we co-create through you, in you and with you, moment by moment,  thought by thought, choice by choice.

Great author of all things, you know our hearts deepest desires, our highest thoughts, our noblest aspirations: we seek for the grace to be our best selves, we seek for the vision to build up and fortify our human kinship, rather than degrade and destroy that kinship; we seek for the humility to understand the fears and hopes of all our brothers and sisters, even those led to desperate acts of madness and destruction.

We seek to bequeath to the children of the world to come more than our failures; we seek for the godliness in us that it takes to care for all people… as well as for ourselves.

To these high aspirations and deep longings, may we constrain our might,  may resist the temptations of power and refuse to attack the most readily attackable, may we understand that vengeance begets violence, that we may be bringers of peace wherever we go, that may we become more merciful and more patient and more gracious and more trusting, knowing that no one yet has found the limits of your love and mercy. The love and mercy which holds us now.

So may it be. And may we cause it to be so. Shanti, Shalom, Salaam, Namaste, and Amen.

So imagine my chagrin when I showed up, was ushered to the "reserved" section along with the local New Zealand charge d'affairs and the Governor General, opened the program, and discovered that The Unitarian Church of South Australia, co-host of the event, an Adelaide church since 1854 and formerly directly across from the Cathedral, was NOT listed among the faith traditions that were offering prayers that day.

And also, strangely, neither was the Uniting Church of Australia represented in prayer. And they're HUGE.

So much for interfaith harmony.

So I sat there and prayed with everyone else, seething quietly. So much for peace in my heart toward my brothers and sisters in clergy. I was angry and felt disrespected. In the pew, I debated with myself about whether I should seek an explanation (and whether I would buy any one that was likely to be offered). And blaming myself for having cocked a snook at the Archbishop in the media several months ago. This is how power works: it never forgets. It gets even.

But what got me out of this dark, crazy-making state of mind was the collective affect of the service itself. It was truly an example of the spirit making you see the bigger picture, getting you to release your ego, lifting up your eyes and heart and remembering what's important.

Don't let other's pettiness make you petty, it seemed to say. Don't seek for vengeance. Let go, be bigger than this.

And so it came to pass that once again, something Bigger than Me reached down into the grave I had dug for myself, and lifted me up and set me back on my feet.

I should know this by now. But once in a while, you need reminding: it's not about you. The hospitality of co-hosting has to be freely given and not a means of vaunting yourself or your posse. He who seeks for recognition has no genuine community feeling, Adler said. And by the end of that service, community feeling was all I felt.

Or Interfaith harmony, you could call it. Praise be.