To the editor:
Powerfully insightful and inspiring was Rev. Dr. Linda Horton’s Soul Searching faith column of May 22. Throughout, Horton, of Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna, ever so blessedly echoed its headline: The Power of Prayer is More Than Just Trying to Talk to God.
As she astutely penned, we are to “engage our hands in building a more just and compassionate world” (and that, I add, includes Kelowna).
Horton’s words especially resonated because of what had graced my heart, mind, eyes, and ears earlier that day and on the Sunday two days earlier. The writer of the daily thought for May 22 in the The Friendship Book of 2012 noted renowned U.S. businessman Roger Babson’s declaration: “The greatest undeveloped resource of our country is faith; the greatest unused power is prayer.” To which the thought writer added: “A thought that’s surely as applicable today as it ever was, no matter which country we call home.”
Similarly, building upon faith, prayer, and the God-given potential within each of us, guest speaker Ed Weiss, addressing Trinity Baptist Church services May 20, reeled off striking life stories of people who had, in Horton’s words, recognized both “service as a spiritual discipline” and “a form of prayer—an activity that connects us to deep roots of wholeness, meaning and creativity…that flows from and strengthens our sense of interrelatedness with all beings.” Or as phrased by Weiss, youth pastor and youth counsellor at The House, a Christian ministry next to the UBC Okanagan campus, there “is a persistent itch” in each of us to make our lives meaningful by activating that inner spark and developing our potential.
Weiss’s point was emphatically dramatized in his life-journey stories of a one-time prized NHL prospect fictitiously identified as Walter and Mother Teresa. In prefacing their stories by way of illustration, he first told of a little boy’s amazed wonder at the completed product of a sculptor whom he initially saw chipping into a stone slab. The boy asked how he had seen a magnificent lion in the stone, and the sculptor replied that he had first pictured the lion in his heart.
Likewise, so much like God sees us, whether unbroken or broken in body and spirit—which Weiss so touchingly related in the case of 19-year-old “Walter” who, shortly before his first NHL training camp, broke his neck in a swimming mishap, becoming a quadriplegic. Long mired in misery, that “persistent itch” in this once-robust potential superstar, now Canada’s longest-living quadriplegic, grew so that today he is in Vancouver working with and fuelling hope in other disabled spinal cord victims.
So, also, out of misfortune and even tragedy can emerge brilliant life missions, like that of Mother Teresa, whom, Weiss pointed out, had been “transitioning” from being a teacher to a missionary when first encountering the starving and dying in the streets of Calcutta, India. One day, amid the squalor, Mother Teresa came upon a woman who had crawled who knows how far to deposit herself on the grass near a shiny, new hospital. Chunks of her toes and feet had be nibbled off by rats. Mother Teresa carried her into the hospital, refused to be deterred by an angry nurse demanding Mother Teresa to return “that diseased thing” outside.
Two hours later, the woman died in a hospital bed, prompting the irate nurse to sneer that a bed had been occupied for two hours to accomplish what good purpose? To which the saintly nun replied, “It’s true she lived like an animal, but she died like a human being!” And, from those words was born the statement of Mother Teresa’s lifetime mission—caring for the dying.
Words reflective, as well, of columnist Horton’s words that: “…the only hands that God has are ours. Ours are the hands that feed a child, that embrace the grieving, that give shape to community.”
Imagine the world that could be sculpted if all nations, faiths, and peoples employed their hands and hearts on behalf of each other!
Wally Dennison,
Kelowna
