National Day of Prayer

Today, May 3, 2018, is the 66th National Day of Prayer. As a Catholic and a priest, every day is a day of prayer. Every year, our nation sets aside a day for prayer because prayer changes people. Every time I pray, I know that it changes me and my life. Sometimes, I am even blessed to see changes in others as I pray for them. For people of faith, prayer is an indispensable part of our relationship with God. All relationships require conversation, and prayer is our chance to talk with God. In prayer, we share our hopes with God, and we listen for God’s hope for us. The Second Continental Congress established days of prayer and fasting going back to the earliest years of our nation. Various other national days, including Thanksgiving, were set aside in the 1800s. However, it was 1952 when the National Day of Prayer as we know it was enacted. Over these many years, our attitude toward national prayer has changed. Originally, there was a great deal of humility in the prayer. Sometimes people fasted, going without food as a gesture of humility before God. The point was to conform our nation to God’s will. If you read political speeches from the 1800s, you’ll notice that when presidents invoked God, they expressed hope that our nation was on God’s side. They prayed with humility. This is a far cry from the common assumption today that our nation is always in the right, and that we must thereby speak with assurance that God is on our side. Too often, we tell God what to do, instead of asking God what we must do. The National Day of Prayer, at its best, offers all of us in this wonderful nation the gift of praying that we might be blessed by God’s wisdom and courage. We pray that we would always know and do those things God wills. This is not a day for using prayer to achieve whatever political aims we might want. It is rather a day for inviting God to guide our politics. My prayer as a Catholic is always to have the wisdom, strength, and courage to be on God’s side. I’ll pray for justice, peace, and mercy for all. I’ll pray for freedom for all people to thrive as the people God made them to be. I’ll pray for our nation to use those things God has given us for the common good.