Deacon Susan Erickson

Dear Siblings in Christ,

I have been thinking about prayer recently, and wondering why it sometimes seems so hard—at least for me!  It’s not so much praying itself that is difficult as remembering to pray.  

In our Tuesday Co-ed Bible Study we’re reading the Book of Job. Perhaps I’m influenced by Job’s example;  I’ve been asking God somewhat irritable questions, among them:  “Why have you made us in such a way that we default to all sorts of random distractions and self-centered thoughts? Shouldn’t our default mode have been an instinctive and ongoing conversation with you?”

But today’s feast day, which celebrates James Otis Sargent Huntington, started me thinking that prayer might take different and varied forms, including activity in the world. 

November 25 is the anniversary of Huntington’s profession of life monastic vows, in New York in 1884. Huntington was a co-founder of the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine order and the first Episcopal monastic order founded in the United States.  

For a monastic, however, Huntington spent a lot of time in the world, championing the cause of labor, progressive taxation, and alleviating poverty. One blog I read notes that he must have spent as much time on trains as in his cell.  

In short, Huntington was a contradictory figure. As a current South African brother in the Order describes him: “He was from a wealthy and well-educated family and his second home, after the Monastery, seems to have been the Harvard Club in New York City—a[n] elite center of posh “old boy” chumminess. And most of all he was a champion of social justice and of those who were at the bottom rung of the social ladder.”  

So the Anglo-Catholic monk prayed not only in his cell, but perhaps can be said to have prayed among the poor immigrants of New York’s Lower East Side. The very fact that a member of the “elite” came to feel a solidarity with workers and immigrants may itself have been a form of prayer.

Preserve your people, O God, from discouragement in the face of adversity, as You did Your servant James Huntington, knowing that when You have begun a good work You will bring it to completion. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, forever and ever.  Amen.

Faithfully,

—Deacon Susan