WHY PRAY?
I will always remember the events of September 11, 2001, when the terrorist group al-Queda attacked the United States. I was up very late the evening before on September 10th and still up in the very early morning hours of September 11th, working on a paper for one of my graduate courses in Scripture at St. Mary’s University that was due on September 11th. As always, I was working on this paper at the last minute, because I was working in the business world more than full time and wasn’t able to work on papers during the day. I will never forget the sense of dread that engulfed me that night. All I could sense was the word ‘death’, but was unable to interpret it.
I kept waking up my husband, telling him someone was about to die, and he kept telling me to finish up my paper and get some sleep. But did I pray? Unfortunately, no, I did not turn to prayer. I just worried about who was going to die. Because I had my Bible already available, I flipped it open. The chapter and verses that stared up at me were from Jeremiah 9:16-21(NABRE):
16 Thus says the LORD of hosts:
Inquire, and call the wailing women to come;
summon the most skilled of them.
17 Let them come quickly
and raise for us a dirge,
That our eyes may run with tears,
our pupils flow with water.
18 The sound of the dirge is heard from Zion:
We are ruined and greatly ashamed;
We have left the land,
given up our dwellings!
19 Hear, you women, the word of the LORD,
let your ears receive the word of his mouth.
Teach your daughters a dirge,
and each other a lament:
20 Death has come up through our windows,
has entered our citadels,
To cut down children in the street,
young people in the squares.
21 Corpses shall fall like dung in the open field,
Like sheaves behind the harvester,with no one to gather them.
Not very comforting verses! I even read them to my exasperated husband, telling him that something really terrible was about to happen. But did I pray? Unfortunately, no, I did not turn to prayer. I just continued to pace the house, worried sick. I finally fell asleep in complete exhaustion, after I emailed my paper to my professor.
I woke up around 9 AM to the sound of an incessantly ringing telephone. It was my husband, calling from work. He told me to turn on the television, right now. As I turned it on, I saw the photo at the top of this reflection – one of the World Trade Center towers on fire, smoke billowing from it, and a plane headed straight for the second tower.
As I watched, to my horror, I also saw the tiny figures of people leaping from the buildings to escape the flames. And then one tower, and then the other, collapsed. Yes, death had indeed come through our palace windows, and the dead would be buried in the rubble. I put the Bible away in my bookshelf, marking the passage from Jeremiah, but too shaken to ever use it again. I will always remember the events of September 11, 2001. But did I pray? Unfortunately, no, I did not turn to prayer.
In the sorrowful days that followed, I connected with other intercessors with whom I have prayed in the past. All of them had the same feeling of dread in the hours before the attack on the World Trade Center towers, and none of them had been able to interpret it. But did we pray? Unfortunately, none of us turned to prayer. We just worried.
We are now at ‘such a time as this’, when we are being summoned to fervent prayer. Brothers and sisters, please do not be like me in the hours before the events of September 11th. Now is the time for prayer. Now is the time to spend time alone with our Lord. Who knows, perhaps the prayers of the faithful can change the course of this pandemic? We can and must set aside time every day to pray against the scourge of this pandemic.