Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today is the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, an annual event of the World Council of Churches. It runs from January 18, which used to be a feast day associated with Peter, to January 25, which is the feast that commemorates the conversion of Paul. For Friday of this coming week, I'm organizing the monthly Taize service held by the Episcopal church Hugo and I attend (Taize refers to a meditative style of devotion involving repetitive singing and long periods of silence), and I'm bending the theme of that service toward Christian unity, the enduring hope that historical divisions among Christians will be overcome.

By a curious kind of coincidence—of the kind that my former spiritual mentor Michael Chase would have insisted isn't a coincidence at all—the scriptural theme for this year's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is the passage in Ezekiel 37 about the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph becoming one, the passage Mormons have used as a prooftext about the Bible and the Book of Mormon. (Do they still do that, or have enough people in high places finally learned how to read in context that correlation has quietly backed away from that embarrassing misreading?) Apparently the team in charge of creating this year's worship resources for the Week of Prayer is Korean, and they liken Ezekiel's prophecy about the reunification of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the longed-for reunification of their own country, which in turn is being taken as a type of the unification of Christians. The coincidence of their using an old Mormon prooftext as their theme creates an odd kind of connection to the material for me.

It occurs to me that there's also an odd coincidence (an uncomfortable one) in that I'm beginning my observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity immediately after a week in which I've been reflecting on Joseph Smith's First Vision, with its thorny passage—thorny even to progressively orthodox Latter-day Saints—about all other churches being wrong, their creeds an abomination, their professors all corrupt, etc.

But let's not go there, except to say that that passage represents the kind of interreligious exclusivity and hostility I'll be praying against this week. I'm thinking that my devotion for the week will be to recite an adapted rosary each morning. I'll start with the Apostles Creed (which even an orthodox Mormon could assent to, if in the line "I believe in the holy catholic church," you understand "catholic" to mean "universal," as in open to all people, male and female, black and white, etc.). I'll use the Lord's Prayer at the usual points. And then in place of the Hail Mary, I'll repeat the injunction from D&C 38:27, "I say to you, Be one; and if you are not one, you are not mine."

I'm looking forward to this: in the past, I've found using the rosary this way to be a fruitful meditative experience. I'll pick a short verse of LDS scripture to repeat for the decades (the five sets of ten beads where Catholics pray the Hail Mary), and the concentrated repetition of the verse becomes a way of reflecting and opening myself up to whatever the Spirit might have to say.

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One final thing before I go do my first rosary recitation of the week: I give thanks for the ceasefire in Gaza and the beginning of the Israeli pullout. I pray for the international attempt now underway at working out a long-term peace. In Christ's name, amen.