COMMENTARY: Unanswered Prayers

By the time I returned home after attending meetings last night, it was nearly Thursday morning. I made my way slowly through the dimly lit house, wanting little more than to collapse in bed beside my husband. When I entered the bedroom, however, the bed was full. Whether by nightmare or stomach ache, our 5-year-old slept peacefully on my portion of the bed. I sighed, picked up a nightgown and headed for the bottom bunk in the children’s room. Quite frankly, I was happy just to be finding an empty pillow.

As I lay still, listening to the wind swirl outside before another spring storm, I let the previous day’s events play behind my eyes, compartmentalizing those items that needed further attention and discarding those that were complete. As the scenes flickered, one dominated: the email sent by Iowa Family Policy Center President Chuck Hurley in response to the “Day of Silence” scheduled for Friday. The student-led event gives young adults an opportunity to call attention to an evil within their own community — violence, harassment and bullying based on sexual orientation. It provides this population, so often left to suffer the consequences of adult actions in silence, a voice. Ironically, it is the student’s refusal to speak that provides them the loudest of voices on this one day.

Hurley’s prayer request continued to replay in my mind. “Pray throughout the day for the salvation and healing of ‘openly gay’ students.” Now, I grew up in an extremely religious family. I take prayer requests seriously and fully believe in the power of asking for assistance from something/someone larger than myself. This particular prayer request, however, left me feeling both sad and frustrated. The emotions were so great that I got out of the bunk bed and fumbled through the house for the dictionary.

sal – va – tion (s?l-v?’sh?n) – noun

1. Preservation or deliverance from destruction, difficulty, or harm.
2. A source, means or cause of such preservation or deliverance.
3. Saving someone or something from harm or from an unpleasant situation.
4. The state of being saved or preserved from harm.
5. In Christianity, union or friendship with God and deliverance from original sin and damnation.

The “original sin” for Christians was the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The act led to their expulsion from Eden by God. The act also caused humans’ fall from divine grace. Because of this event, most Christians believe that from the moment a child is conceived, he or she, as a descendant of Adam and Eve, is already in a state of sin. Most Christians also believe that the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross and his subsequent resurrection was atonement for original sin. So, any individual who believes in Jesus and accepts baptism is freed from the confines of original sin and experiences salvation.

One of the things I learned at an early age through my Christian upbringing is that salvation, in the Christian sense, is a gift. No one can earn it and no one deserves it.

Since salvation is a gift, neither earned nor deserved, everyone already has it. Hurley is not requesting we ask God to grant salvation to others, because God has already done that. He’s requesting that we all ask God to make others behave in a way that Hurley (and not necessarily God) deems appropriate.

Looking at salvation in terms of the secular definitions, it appears that Hurley is actually praying for the success of the Day of Silence. Tomorrow students will refrain from speaking to draw attention to violence against LGBT students in their schools. If we are to pray for the salvation of gay students — i.e., their protection from harm — then we are praying for the violence, harassment and bullying to stop.

The second part of the prayer request still gives me pause. Hurley requests that we pray for the “healing” of gay students. Given Hurley’s deliberate manipulation of the Gospel in the first part of his request, I’m not inclined to believe that Hurley is requesting we pray for the healing of those gay students who have been the victims of school violence. Hurley wants us to pray to God for gay people to be healed, much like we’d pray for a person suffering with cancer to have the disease eradicated and the body made whole.

As far back as 1901, however, Havelock Ellis joined Sigmund Freud in arguing that homosexuality was not immoral, that it was not a disease, and that many homosexuals made outstanding contributions to society. Those beliefs were backed up by the research of Evelyn Hooker, a noted psychologist, in 1957, but it took until the early 1970s before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Despite all of this scientific evidence and despite the fact that many religious institutions now welcome homosexuals into their congregations, Hurley affirmed his belief that being gay is the same as being stricken with a disease this morning in the Des Moines Register. “…I have a problem with an effort to legitimize behavior that is physically, socially and spiritually destructive. Promoting destructive behavior is not the job of our schools. They should be promoting healthy behavior,” Hurley said.

Last night, after considering Hurley’s prayer request, I decided instead to offer my own. I prayed for Hurley, that his eyes might be opened to the word of the God he professes to love so dearly. I prayed for him to be provided unconditional love and tolerance for all creation. Above all else, I prayed for peace — deep, soul-calming and spirit-quenching peace to enter Hurley’s life and allow him to see the value of all people, even those who do not share his Biblical interpretations. I closed with a request that next year there will be no need for the Day of Silence, that each young person who enters our schools will be treated with dignity and respect. Amen.