As a visitor to a great many Episcopal churches all over this country for many years, I can attest that the general state of "The Prayers of the People" is deplorable. The revision of the 1928 Prayer Book was supposed to move us away from rote prayers. With very rare exceptions, this has not happened. Most of the prayers in most of the churches are recited in a boring, repetitive fashion, week in and week out--and changing from Form 1 to Form 6 (or whatever) does not improve the situation. We never actually ask anything; instead, we reel off a list of names without differentiation, or we say "For (fill in the blank)" without ever identifying what we are pleading with the Lord to do "for" whomever or whatever.

I can remember only two congregations in my decades of churchgoing where the prayers were prepared and offered with imagination and deep commitment. In both cases they were composed and read by lay people who had obviously been identified as gifted in this ministry. I have never forgotten the way that these lay ministers presented immediate local problems for prayer, while directly upholding community, national and world concerns. The thanksgivings were specific, the world-wide church was remembered in its various needs, and there was a sense that God was really being personally addressed. These liturgical prayers were composed Sunday by Sunday by these gifted lay people, who used the forms provided but expanded them to meet the season, the need, the location, the current situation.

It has been about ten years since I last heard this done really well. On this past Sunday, I heard it again at St. James in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. This is a congregation under great strain because their historic building, the oldest church in town, has been deemed unsafe and they have been forbidden to use it. They are meeting in a local rental hall. Yet in the main service last Sunday, the prayers were beautifully composed, earnest, and above all directly related to the concerns of the contemporary situation--from the needs of the specific congregation to the demonstrators in the streets of Tehran. Even better, they were designed to arise out of the biblical readings for the day.

The Rev. Francie Hills, rector, began by identifying two people in the congregation with these specific gifts. She gave them copies of Prayers for Sundays and Seasons, by Peter Scagnelli, published by Liturgy Training Publications (Roman Catholic). There are three books, one for each liturgical year. Francie explained, "We adapt these significantly for our use at St. James," meaning that they add and subtract according to the Episcopal Church and to the local situation, but they have a splendid liturgical template on which to base their adaptations.

Their offering certainly fell upon my ears and heart like manna.

Jonathan Schell's most famous book, about nuclear holocaust, is The Fate of the Earth. A more recent one, however, The Unconquerable World, is one of a very small number of books which, for me, have been mind-altering. His subject is the rise of nonviolent resistance and "people's war" on the world stage in the 20th century. He begins with a trenchant analysis of war according to Clausewitz, whose views he believes are supportive of his conviction that the world is moving toward a new kind of struggle in which the power of ideas carried out under the leadership of people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Tutu, Lech Walesa, and others, cannot be stopped. (See previous Rumination about the Palestinians.)

Tienanmen Square is the great exception, but we cannot know what seeds still lie dormant underground, waiting for the breath of the Spirit. In the meantime, should we not all be praying that "an angel in the whirlwind" be directing this storm in Tehran? (Speaking of which, one of the other books that I count among the very few is John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus.)

That got your attention, right? Yep, the Murdoch version of the WSJ is (predictably) a lot more colorful, in both senses of that word, than the old grey version. No little drawing in black-and-white dots for South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. His face in full color, together with a chronicle of his misadventures, fills up a tabloid-sized amount of space on the front page today. (Will we ever again be able to say we’re going hiking on the Appalachian Trail without irony?)

The former GOP chairman in South Carolina, Katon Dawson, said that Sanford’s purported Trail hike and further obfuscations were “the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen” and continued, “We’ve [the GOP) been struggling with our elected officials. We’ve run on values and we’ve been struggling.”

But more useful from the Christian point of view was this statement by State Senator John Land:

“The position he’s taken the whole time he’s been in office is, ‘I’m smarter than the rest, I’m more religious than the rest, I’m more godly than the rest.’ I just don’t see how he can come back and be a sinner like the rest of us and still function.”

The article went on to state that Mr. Sanford “in the past has emphasized his Christian faith and absolute moral values.” He voted to impeach Bill Clinton and he publicly disapproved of Rep. Bob Livingstone when he acknowledged extramarital affairs, saying “We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period.”

The whole story is a gold mine for the study of human nature. "What fools these mortals be!"

And from a different angle, perhaps we might reflect on the saying of Rochefoucauld:

Hypocrisy is the homage [or tribute] that vice pays to virtue. (Maxim 218)

The African-American governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, told the graduates of Wheaton College (Mass.) about the trajectory of his life:

Our youngest daughter, Catherine, graduated from high school a couple of years ago. Sitting at her graduation, I couldn’t help thinking about the difference between her journey and my own, nearly 35 years earlier. I grew up on welfare on the South Side of Chicago in my grandparents’ two-bedroom tenement. I shared a room and a set of bunk beds with my mother and my sister, who is here today — so we would rotate from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor.

I went to overcrowded, sometimes violent public schools. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t love to read, but I don’t actually remember ever owning a book until I got my break in 1970, when I came to Massachusetts on a scholarship to boarding school. ... Now, our Catherine, by contrast, has always had her own room, most of that time in a house in a leafy neighborhood outside of Boston. By the time she got to high school, she had already traveled on four continents, she knew how to use and pronounce the “concierge,” and she had shaken hands in the White House with the president of the United States.

In a commencement address at the University of Oklahoma, the beloved historian David McCullough said:

There is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. Never was, never will be. We are all, as were those in whose footsteps we follow, shaped by the influence and examples of countless others — parents, grandparents, friends, rivals. And by those who wrote the music that moves us to our souls, those whose performance on stage or on the playing field took our breaths away, those who wrote the great charters which are the bedrock of our system of self-government. And so many who, to our benefit, struggled and suffered through times of trouble and grave uncertainty. And by teachers. ... I want to stress as emphatically as I can the immeasurable importance of teachers.