Some Presidents keep the Sabbath by going to church

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, September 3, 2017. Posted Monday morning, September 4.

His words flew up, but did his thoughts remain below?: “President Donald Trump talks with Rev. D. Andrew Olivo as he arrives to attend church at St. John's Church in Washington, Sunday, Sept. 3, 2017.” Photo by Susan Walsh/AP. Courtesy of the Associated Press via the Washington Post.

Today's National Prayer Day. Did you know that? It is. By Presidential Proclamation.

The President proclaimed that he proclaimed it on Twitter.

You might think that's pretty rich, coming from a guy whose ability to finish this sentence, "Our Father, who art in heaven..." is doubtful.

I missed the news when he signed the proclamation and the first I heard we were having a National Prayer Day was when his tweet about it started showing up in my Timeline, RT’d indignantly, ironically, derisively, and, God bless them, admiringly or at least approvingly by the many people of all sorts and conditions I follow.  I don’t think like a good Christian anymore and my first thought on reading his tweet was to wonder why he thought we needed a National Prayer Day since we already have a National Day of Prayer.

Probably not for the same reason many of us who are not among his die-hards think we do.

And it struck me as redundant to proclaim a Sunday National Prayer Day. It's like proclaiming the Fourth of July National Fireworks Day.

But of course it’s a response to Harvey. Duh. The official name for the day as stated in the actual proclamation is National Day of Prayer for Victims of Hurricane Harvey and for Our National Response and Recovery Efforts.

All well and good, I guess, and it’s one of the very few truly presidential things he’s done, although it’s the bare minimum of competent presidenting to try to comfort and console and encourage the nation during a time of crisis.

Man actually went to church this morning though. St John's Episcopal in D.C. Yeah, I'm surprised too. I was sure that if he bothered he'd attend services at his usual place of worship, the Little Chapel at the 19th Hole. But I guess the calculating cynic won out over the lazy hedonist and golf addict, or maybe Melania did, and there he was, in the pew at St John's, where presumably he said a prayer or two or at least nodded along reverently as those around him who knew their prayers said them. Maybe he mumbled the words after them, repeating what he heard a second behind. That counts as praying. I think.

Unless, as I can't help suspecting, his words flew up while his thoughts remained below.

Can't blame him if that was the case. He has a lot to think about.

How much he hates James Comey. His feuds with various fellow Republicans. How he can get away with firing Robert Mueller. How to start a nuclear war with North Korea. How he’d like to start a trade war with China or whoever. Ending the DACA. Throwing more brown people out of the country. Letting fewer brown people in. All that fake news about his blunders and failures and increasing unpopularity. His golf game. The Wall.

Oh, yeah, and Harvey.

I keep coming back to his proclaiming National Prayer Day on a Sunday. Our official National Day of Prayer is scheduled by law for the first Thursday of May every year. If you're inclined to observe it, you have to interrupt your workday for at least a couple of minutes. What do you have to interrupt on Sunday? Church? You interrupt your prayers to say a prayer?

But that's a Christianity-centric thought. Not everybody keeps the Sabbath on Sunday. Not everybody keeps a Sabbath. That includes a billion people who pray five times a day every day. Now that I think about it, it's insulting to Jews and Muslims and other people of faith who aren't Christian to ask them to remember and keep holy the Christian Lord's day.

I think it ought to offend Christians as well.

"What do you think we're doing today? And who do you think we're including in our prayers without the least prompting from you? You think we didn’t notice Harvey?"

I'm not sure what they'd be praying for or what good it would do?

Lord, maybe you had your back turned the last week or so, but there was a big hurricane down here and it was pretty bad for the people in its way. Would you please look in on Houston and see to it that no more people die in addition to the ones who did while you weren't looking? Oh, and while you're at it, how about a miracle or two or ten thousand to help the people who lost their homes and all they own put their lives back together? Thanks.

Of course, I'm a heathen these days and only pray in moments of extreme weakness, after which I feel foolish and apologetic. If I still went to confession, I’d confess to this as if it was a sin.

Me: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. Last week in a moment of desperation I said a prayer even though I know there’s no God or if there is, he doesn’t work like that.”

Priest: “You’re forgiven, my son. As your penance, say six Hail Marys and an Our Father.”

Me: “Um…”

But this kind of praying---asking God to do for you and yours what he’s not doing for millions of people in the same trouble, what he’s routinely not done throughout the millennia people have been praying to him---infuriates me. It’s natural but it’s addressed to the wrong divine entity, one they imagine when they look at the Sistine Chapel, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-just, all-merciful, all-loving God the Father. But the answer to these prayers is so often no that if there’s a god there to hear them, he/she/it/they must either be indifferent, incompetent, malicious, or something a lot less than omnipotent. Like I said, I’m a heathen now and it’s been a long time since I’ve been any sort of believer, but the roots of my apostasy were sunk back in grade school when I was earning A’s in religious ed, winning prizes for scripture knowledge, and serving mass as the best altar boy in the parish and maybe the diocese---that was never decided in an open and fair contest, much to my chagrin. Obviously, if there’d been a diocesan altar server face-off, I’d have lost points for vanity---and it was praying like this that did it. I realized that whole schools full of good little Catholic girls and boys and the nuns who taught them praying together couldn’t save Bobby Kennedy and that, pray as hard as we might, the children starving in Africa were still going to starve, and the Doubting Thomas in me started his career.

Actually, the official White House-issued proclamation is fairly standard and apolitically homilistic as these things go and could have been said by any president---it’s just that any president before him could have said it or something very much like it off the cuff and not fumbled for words the way Trump has done whenever it’s been left up to him to choose the words---and there’s nothing in it about praying for miracles, only for strength and comfort. I’m much less grumpy about that sort of praying, although I can’t help thinking that what people are praying for is the strength to endure what God has either pummeled them with or while he stood idly by, paring his fingernails, watching them get pummeled by forces he supposedly controls.

Blessedly, it does not include any of Our Mr President Trump’s habitual self-congratulation. What it also doesn’t include is any promise of money from the federal government to help in the recovery or even a call for people to donate more to make up for the billion or so dollars the Republicans in Congress, fully expecting the president will sign off on it, for disaster relief in general are planning to cut, another one of their accounting tricks to make room on the budget for more tax cuts for the rich.

The proclamation is, essentially a prayer itself, as it ought to be, asking God to bless the people who have come to the aid and rescue of those in need, and I like that and would gladly join in praying for that if, well, you know. The rescuers themselves and the people being rescued might ask God why he didn’t spare people the need to be rescued.

God, for his part, would be within his rights to reply, “You can’t pin this one all on me. I didn’t  cause global climate change this time.”

There is something in the proclamation that I can get behind whole-heartedly. That’s the message, implicit and explicit, throughout, that we’re all called upon to help each other out in times of crisis and need.

The Catechism as good Sisters of the Presentation taught it at St Helen’s included this exchange:

Q. What must we do to save our souls?

A. To save our souls, we must worship God by faith, hope, and charity…

The nuns hit that charity hard.

It wasn’t lost on us that at the times when we prayed for the starving children we were also handed our cardboard Lenten rice bowls and our little cartons for trick or treating for UNICEF.

If there is a God, this is why he put us here. It’s Jesus’ first commandment. I’m in the habit of quoting Doctor Vonnegut on this---”We’re here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”---but it boils down to this.

Love one another.

It’s not a sentiment our President seems to personally share. But at least it’s in the proclamation.

__________________________________________________________________________________

If you can swing it, here’s the link to GlobalGiving’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund.

And here’s the link to the Houston Food Bank.

Comments

[David O White]

As an atheist I don't care about the national day of prayer, especially as proclaimed by this president*. It is just another photo op for him. He is apolitical and non-religious to his core.

Not relevant to the post but I was just reading that Peter Dinklage and his wife live near New Paltz. My wife watches Game of Thrones but I don't. But I did enjoy his performance in "The Station Master".

[FDChief]

While I understand that, as Sam Clemens is supposed to have said, many people have a religion and, like dandruff, seem to spend considerable time and energy fooling with it it seems to me ridiculously contradictory to pray to an omnipotent, omniscient deity to mitigate the forces that said deity is supposed to control. It's like arguing with the traffic cop over a ticket. How often has that worked for ya?

Nope. Sorry, bible-bangers, but you either get your omnipotent Sky Daddy or you get an Almighty that's guiltless of inflicting suffering and death.

But not both.