#29 March 26,2006.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together for our Badaliya Prayer on Sunday, March 26, 2006 from
3pm-4:30pm in the small chapel in St. Paul's Parish Center. Please join us in
person or in spirit as we pray for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East
and especially in the Holy Land.
The news from Iraq about Christian Peacemaker Team member, Tom Fox, has saddened
us all. Please remember him and his friends and family in your Badaliya prayer
and also all those who have been willing to risk their lives in service of peacemaking
throughout the world. One our members who worked with Tom in Iraq sent the following:
If you want to read Tom's blog, it is at
http://waitinginthelight.blogspot.com/
Photos are at http://www.cpt.org/gallery
If you want to send condolences to Tom's family, send them to Family
of Tom Fox, c/o Christian Peacemaker Teams, P.O. Box 6508 Chicago,
IL 60680-6508
It is natural at this time to focus on the Christian Lenten 40 day fast for
our further reflection this month. I would like to invite you to bring your
experience to our gathering and share any Biblical, Qur'anic, or other spiritual
writings or rituals that you have found helpful in this call to return to the
Lord with all your heart and mind.
All three Abrahamic faiths have in common the traditions of prayer, fasting
and almsgiving and Lent has come to encompass all three for Christians on our
journey to greater freedom to love others as God has loved us. As a spiritual
practice Fasting is perhaps the least understood. Gandhi experienced fasting
as a loving action of deep spiritual meaning when entered into as an atonement
for the sins of violence that he saw so much of in his struggle to reslove conflict
through nonviolent means. It is clear why Louis Massignon was so drawn to the
spirit of Gandhi who he saw as the personification of Badaliya, substitutionary
prayer.
According to one of our members from India, not many people even there recognize
that Gandhi's fasting was a means of taking onto himself the suffering
of others and being the prayer for them that they were not yet able to enter
into themselves. When he saw violent uprisings he turned to fasting, realizing
that what he was asking of the people in seeking their true freedom they were
not yet ready for. He saw it as his own failure and sought the way of fasting
as a cleansing and atoning prayer.
Our Muslim brothers and sisters experience the one month fast of Ramadan each
year as another way of healing their relationships with others and deepening
their experience of God. Some describe the experience of fasting from sunrise
to sunset every day for a month as increasing their abiity to focus, a heightening
of awareness, and sharpening of attention. Ramadan always includes almsgiving
and healing of conflicts with others and a great building of community as they
go from one home of friends to another for the ritual breaking of the fast every
evening.
I believe that when Massignon fasted every First friday before the Badaliya
gatherings in the evening he too fasted from sunrise to sunset in communion
with his Muslim friends and that his experience of it was much like Gandhi's
description that follows:
"A genuine fast cleanses the body, mind, and soul. It crucifies the flesh
and to that extent sets the soul free. A sincere prayer can work wonders. It
is an intense longing of the soul for its even greater purity. Purity thus gained
when it is utilized for a noble purpose becomes a prayer. Fasting and prayer
therefore are a most powerful process of purification, and that which purifies
necessarily enables us the better to do our duty and attain our goal. If therefore
fasting and prayer seem at times not to answer, it is not because there is nothing
in them but because the right spirit is not behind them". (Young India.
March 24,1920)
Peace to you.
Dorothy