Keeping someone/something/someplace in your thoughts does not do anything. Prayer does not do anything. If you want to help someone, if you want to change something, then you have to actually go out and fucking do something.
I had this internship two summers ago that required me to go to Chicago for a training session with the parent organization of the one I was working for. The other interns and I would be working with organizations that focused on mobilizing people and communities of faith to make progress for working people in our communities, through various combinations of advocacy and direct support. The second morning of training, we went to join other local faith leaders in standing in solidarity with workers at a major hotel chain during the corporation’s shareholders meeting. The plan was that while the workers were engaged in their picket, we, the faith delegation, would attempt to get as close to the meeting as possible and publicly ask the shareholders to hear from a worker affected by their policies. We ended up getting much closer than the organizers anticipated - all the way to the final security checkpoint - before we were stopped. We met with a representative of the company, had a hokey little photo-op where a rabbi presented him with elements from the Passover story to represent the oppression of the workers, and then left and joined the picket lines. The story got lots of local and a little bit of national press attention. The conflict between the workers and the corporation is still unresolved.
You could read my story and say that what I did was the perfect example of what Gus is talking about above. That I got off my ass and did something. And, in some ways, you’d be right. But the other part of the story is that our whole action that day was wrapped in prayer. Together, we prayed before starting the action, chanted a Psalm during the action, and prayed while at the security checkpoint. I prayed when I got up that morning, during the action, and at several points throughout the rest of the day. For us, prayer was a central part of going out and doing something. And, for us, what we did would not have been the same had it not been linked as it was to our prayer lives. Our prayers grounded us in what we were doing, reminded us of the connections between our actions and the biblical call to “do justice,” and bound us together as we undertook our plan to, quite frankly, trespass on private property and disrupt a private event. Prayer provided a space and method for reflection, which is an essential part of any activist life. Prayer was doing something. Prayer did something.
My point isn’t that the only way to do something, or something good, is to pray. My point isn’t that people without prayer lives or without a belief system that includes prayers don’t or can’t do incredible things for the world. My point isn’t even necessarily that Gus is all the way wrong to exhort people to “actually go out and fucking do something.” My point is simply that things are usually more complicated than three sentences will allow for.
Source: obi-wankenblowme
