Daily Devotion

Pastor Pat and some of our church friends have been doing something called Walk, Talk, and Pray for some time now. What a wonderful experience to get their bodies involved in prayer! Similarly, the two groups who walked some of the Camino de Santiago found that our bodies, our feet, were praying just as much as our hearts or minds. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and he said, “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.”

Protest, I think, is a form of spiritual practice. Like fasting or alms-giving or prayer walking, protesting injustice and helping others have their voices heard by authority has a long history in our scriptures and tradition. I just wrote a chapter in my new book about Esther and her raising her voice to save her people from massacre. Abraham protested to God (in a famously funny passage) about God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. The widow protested to the unjust judge over and over and over again until he gave her justice. Jesus flipped tables and spoke in pointed riddles to the religious authority about their exploitation and power-hungriness.

Each of us is called to different things, different practices—what a variety! They say, it’s better to teach a person to fish than to give them one, but it’s also important sometimes to give the fish. And it’s important for some to head to the capital and pressure those in power about why the stream where the fish come from is poisoned. All of these are ways to share the love of God with the people around us and to practice seeing God, our living God, active in the day-to-day world around us.

What are your spiritual practices now? What fills you? Have you been to a protest in your life? How did it resonate with your soul then and how does it resonate now?