Garth Rattray | Praying for peace and love is not enough

The Gleaner headline of Wednesday, July 13, read, “Church umbrella group calls for prayers to stand up against crime”. In the body of the piece is this paragraph, “The organisation says it stands firmly against all forms of crime and violence and has resolved to provide solutions that will help to transform communities into safe spaces of peace, harmony, and unity”.

Churches are not only holy places of refuge where the Spirit of God is made manifest, places around which communities, including communities with poor, and needy citizens congregate, commiserate, pray, worship, and socialise. Churches also set great examples by offering assistance to families in the form of food, clothing, employment, education, counselling, medical care, and housing. Several churches are very heavily involved in providing for the poor in a variety of other ways.

There has been a proliferation of churches and church-like organisations with cultish leaning in Jamaica. Jamaica’s church density (the number of churches per capita), is the highest in the world. Paradoxically, our murders per capita are among the highest in the world. Sadly, some worshippers only do a lot of praying and fasting, and expect that God will [miraculously] grant their wishes just because they say, “in the name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ”. But there is a lot more to prayer than that.

I believe that prayer is psychologically and spiritually very powerful. It strengthens the bond with our faith and enables us to do things that we thought were difficult or impossible. Prayer fortifies us in times when we need inner strength to face danger, hardships or grief. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience, therefore bonding with the God-given spirit within us is essential; otherwise, we are only clay ... half of what we truly are.

PRAYER REQUIRES DEEDS

But some people forget that prayer often requires works/deeds to bring wishes (ideas, thoughts and plans) into reality. This Bible verse says a lot on that subject: James 2:18 – “Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works”. It is better to pray for the wisdom and/or strength to get something done, than it is to simply pray that something will (somehow) get done.

I liken our Jamaican society to two gardens. Generations of property managers attend to both the front (fancy) garden, and the backyard (dishevelled) garden. The fancy garden is full of plants that bear the kind of fruit that can be easily marketed, they provide ready income for the property managers. These plants receive special care. Their wants and needs are attended to, they are watered regularly, their soil is tilled and the surroundings beautifully manicured. These plants demand attention and dictate the terms under which they will contribute to the overall property.

The backyard plants inherited rocky, dry, and stone-filled soil. Those plants have many disadvantages. Despite that, they produce a large number of fruits, but, given their circumstances, their quality often falls short of the standard of the fruit produced by the front garden. The plants in the backyard require a lot more work to produce better, comparable fruit. An unofficial decision was made to give these backyard fruits just enough care to keep them alive, but not too much care lest the limited resources end up being spent on them and not on other areas of the property. The backyard fruits are mostly used to make up the numbers required to show the property owners that the managers are producing, and should be retained in their positions.

PARASITIC WEEDS

Thorny, parasitic weeds grew up among the backyard plants. They took over the garden and left the managers barely able to walk among them and care them. An unacceptable number of the fruit from the backyard garden are bitter and several are deadly poisonous. Their poison is leaching out of the backyard and wreaking havoc throughout the property. Machetes and weed wackers are being used in a futile effort to control the thorny, parasitic weeds and the poisonous fruit. Many of the regular backyard fruit have been abandoned by the property owners and managers, and, in order to survive, they became engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the thorny weeds and poisonous fruits.

Praying that the thorny, parasitic weeds and poisonous fruit will magically disappear is a waste of time. The only solution is to get into the backyard garden and till the soil, water the plants, nourish their roots, get rid of the stones, uproot the thorny parasites, and put the poisonous fruit away. Manicure the backyard; give the backyard garden love, care and attention. These interventions will stop the production of thorny parasitic weeds and poisonous fruit. The other fruit will become comparable to the fruit from the front yard.

Although we pay taxes, we can’t expect ‘the government’ to do everything. It will take the entire society to raise up needy communities, and stop the mayhem and murders. People can’t go on living their individual lives and leaving the underprivileged and poor behind … look where that it getting us.

Praying for peace and love is good, but praying for strength and inspiration to do God’s work among the poor is much better. We should each do our part to improve Jamaica.

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.