In a much-beloved spiritual, we find a pilgrim desperately calling upon the Lord for comfort, direction. Add your own interpretation of this cry of supplication.

Standing in the Need of Prayer

It’s me, oh Lord!
Standing in the need of prayer.
It’s me! It’s me, oh Lord!
Standing in the need of prayer.

Not my brother, not my sister,
but it’s me, oh Lord!
Standing in the need of prayer.

From this hymn, we might infer the traveler is seeking personal healing before drowning in a sea of confusion, or the false perception of having been abandoned by Him, the One Who can calm the waters and wipe away every tear. No more petitions for a brother or sister; time for personal attention from the Lord.

And just what, exactly, could a child of today be begging from the Lord? Frequently, whether in a first grade classroom, or a senior high group, students would be asked to write down what they would like most for Christmas, and not sign their names. Countless wishes went something like this:

No quarreling over money. No drinking. A good job for mom or dad, or both. Help in studies to get a scholarship for college. That a friend stop using drugs. Getting control of one’s temper.

Love and peace in the home made the top of the top-ten requests. Not bad wishes. Not bad at all. Most of us find ourselves with the same, but not with enough wisdom to gather our thoughts together and hawk our wares. However, we find a wise leader who has done just that in Albert Nolan, author of Jesus Today; A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, in which he describes the toxic spiritual air our children are breathing daily: “Most human beings today live in a state of suppressed despair, trying to find ways of distracting themselves from the realities of our times.”

He goes on to quote from the writing of Joanna Macy: “A dread of what is happening to our future stays on the fringes of awareness, too deep to name and too fearsome to face.”

Ronald Rolheiser, with the compassion that permeates all his writing, worried about such matters, and gathered some members of his religious community, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, to ponder what they could offer parents , who, he tells us are the first missionaries to their children. Not missionaries to Kenya, Burundi, Chad or Bangladesh, but to their children in London, Washington, Los Angeles, Paris or Vancouver.

Six Oblates joined forces after attending four symposia to seek answers to general questions, and later, sat around, and asked how those symposia could be shared with the public: “What are the key insights we want to share with the world?” The book, Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Children, is the result of their efforts. One participant put it this way:

Jesus offers us a model. He tries to move us from one state to another: we are asleep, and he tries to wake us; we are deaf, and he tries to open our ears; we are dumb, and he tries to open our mouths to speech and praise; we are narrow, and he tries to widen our perspective; we are blind, and he tries to open our eyes; we are lost, and he tries to find us; and we are dead, and he tries to resurrect us. This must be our model within a secularized world.

Mary Jo Leddy, founder of Romero House, a house for refugees in Toronto, is also a founder of The Catholic New Times (an independent Catholic newspaper of Canada). She is described as “prophetic, gentle and gracious.”

Her message is, “We are better than we know and worse than we think.” We need to regain our inner vision, and define us more by what we are for than what we are against. She says our young people are looking for what is beyond words:

If we want to know what Jesus meant, we should look at how he lived. If we want to know what the Church stands for, we need to look at how the Church lives and acts. There is no shortcut,Leddy tells us. If we believe we are all the Church, then we cannot, for example, stand by silently in the face of injustice, while the least among us work for a pittance to put tomatoes on our pizzas.

Burger King hires migrant farm workers to harvest tomatoes in South Florida, working 10 to 12 hours a day, earning 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. On a typical day, each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For this season, many will get a 40 percent cut in pay. Taco Bell and McDonald’s are paying 77 cents per bucket. Why can’t Burger King do the same? How does a boycott sound to you? (my questions) (The New York Times, Eric Schlosser, Nov. 29)

Lord, please give us wisdom, so that our youth may not be scandalized by the injustices we allow to continue. Help us to set them an example to make them proud to live in the United States. Help us to bridge the gap between the wealthy and the destitute, that we may not one day hand on to our children a bloody, civil war.

Lord, we are all “standing in the need of prayer.” Amen.

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