What am I supposed to do when the world feels like it is falling apart?

Some prayerful wisdom spoken by the stones of Iona

I am writing this on a train from Cardiff to Bath, winding up a whirlwind tour of Scotland, Wales, and England with my beloved. One of the (many) highlights of the trip was the chance to spend some time on the Isle of Iona whic is famous for its abbey. The abbey traces its origins back nearly a millenium and a half to a monastic community founded by St. Columba when he arrived on the island in 563 AD.

As with most ancient things, Iona’s spiritual community has experienced death and resurrection multiple times. The current abbey is a modern restoration of a stone monastery built by Benedictines in the 1100s and left to ruin after the Protestant reformations in the 16th century. The Benedictine abbey itself was a restoration, this time of the original complex built by Columba and his followers out of timber and earth. Columba’s monastery was largely destroyed by a series of devastating Viking raids in the late 700s and early 800s, prompting many monks to emigrate to Ireland, where they founded another monastery. Today, the current Iona Community is an international and ecumenical gathering of Christians from various socioeconomic backgrounds committed to the development of a common life that inspires the wider Christian movement towards greater works of justice and peace. Tucked between Iona’s ancient stones are appeals for peace and humanitarian relief in Gaza, support for those living with HIV/AIDS, and information about the urgent climate crisis.

Photo by Lynda B on Unsplash

I was struck by the passage of time as I walked among the towering stone Celtic crosses worn smooth with age and the crumbling graves of holy women and men from centuries ago. In a country as “young” as the United States of America, we tend to count time in decades. Unless we pay attention to the spirituality and traditions of our indigenous neighbors, we often have no frame of reference for what it means for a space to be the locus of prayer for nearly 1,500 years. (For reference: The United States of America is scarcely 250 years old.) Walking through ancient sites gives us a greater sense of perspective, a gift sorely missed in our face-paced, attention-driven, social media-obsessed world.

On our way from Glasgow to Liverpool, we listened to Father James Martin’s “The Spiritual Life Podcast,” where he interviewed Stephen Colbert. The interview, recorded before the death of Pope Francis I, covered a lot of ground, from the Roman Catholic faith Colbert inherited from his parents to the tragic passing of his father and two brothers early in his life to the spirituality of comedy. During the conversation, Colbert made a comment that I’ve been holding for a few days: “seeing through the eyes of eternity.” As a child, Colbert’s mother would often encourage him to gain a sense of perspective in particularly difficult moments by zooming out and attempting to see what he was experiencing in a larger context. When we can learn to hold things lightly, to not get so bogged down in any given moment, and to remind ourselves that we are neither the center of the universe nor the only person experiencing tragedy, perhaps we can feel a sense of connection with others and thus open ourselves to the possibility of joy even in tragedy. Whether it derives from faithful mothers or ancient stones, the wisdom holds. Take a step back and gain some perspective. And if eternity feels like too much, try slightly elongating your sense of time by emersing yourself in something older than you: a forest, a historic place or building, or even a story.

Standing among the overgrown graves of Iona, with mist and clouds veiling the rocky coast of the Isle of Mull in the distance, I wondered what this island has witnessed in the relatively short time that humans have walked on the earth. If these ancient stones could talk, what would they say? Abbeys and nunneries have come and gone. Communities have been planted in hope and nourished in faith, only to be destroyed in violence or allowed to withered in neglect. Art and innovation flourished, only to be worn down by the non-stop flow of the seasons. Great stone buildings have become gardens and pastures for herds of sheep. Iona bears witness to the transience of even the most noble and virtuous things. Like Ozymandias, whose mighty and despair-inducing works were reduced to “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert, time happens to us all. This overwhelming observation was enough for the writer of Ecclesiastes to lament, “‘Meaningless! Everything is meaningless… Everything is completely meaningless! Nothing has any meaning… The sun rises. Then it sets. And then it hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south. Then it turns to the north. Around and around it goes. It always returns to where it started.”

With the situation in the government of the United States of America being what it is at the moment, a looming myopia can separate us from the great sweep of history. None of what we are experiencing is fundamentally new. It is merely a variation on a tragic theme that has played out repeatedly among a humanity that has lost a sense of its identity or destiny. The inhumanity of our government’s policies concerning immigration enforcement is not new, and neither is the weaponization of parts of the government against political opponents or the complicity of our fellow citizens in the cruelty done in our name. The unimaginable suffering being visited on a vulnerable civilian population by Israel’s War in Gaza (where neither belligerent [Israel or Hamas] seems interested in a true and just peace that honors all the people of the land) is not new; neither is the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine or any number of the other simmering conflicts around the globe. The human story is too often one defined by the suffering we visit on one another.

My journey to Iona prompted a question for which I don’t yet have a good answer: how do we live humanely in inhumane times? This question is also not new. One of the explanations for Columba’s travel from Ireland to Iona was his desire to live a humane life of prayer and discipleship away from violence and warfare. Iona was founded in response to this question. “Pray,” is the best answer I can muster, but in the face of such human brokenness when prayer can seem so futile and foolish, I find myself repeating the words of the disciples, “Lord, teach me to pray.”

I’ve been on vacation for the past two Sundays, which have afforded me the opportunity to hear sermons from other priests and ministers. This past Sunday, I was able to hear the Rev. Jarel Robinson-Brown preach during the Mass at his parish in Cardiff, Wales (St. German’s). His sermon focused on the Lord’s Prayer, the center of the reading from Luke 11:1-13. He made a point that before the church had creeds or even an emerging understanding of the nature of Christ, we had the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is the model for Christian prayer. In it, we pray with Jesus to yield our will to that of our Father. We pray for his Kingdom to come, which will, in time, obliterate anything (notice, I did not say anyone) that is incompatible. Lest we forget, our God is “a consuming fire.”

The Lord’s Prayer is followed by a series of seemingly extraordinary claims: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Contrary to popular belief, this is not about treating God like a vending machine from which we acquire wealth, security, and power if we just keep asking. Following the Lord’s prayer, where we pray with Jesus to discern and take on the will of God, “ask… seek… knock…” is about asking and seeking for the things that accord with God’s will, not our own. There’s a story from the Old Testament (1 Kings 3) where God appears to newly-crowned King Solomon and says, “Ask what I should give you.” Solomon asks God for wisdom. God, so pleased that Solomon asked for wisdom rather than “long life or riches, or for the life of your [Solomon’s] enemies,” says, “Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind… I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life.” Prayer is a lot of things (authentic Christian prayer is also not a lot things). One of the underappreciated benefits of prayer is growth of wisdom, and underrated but vital virtue in a world moving too fast to reflect and think deeply.

The scale of human misery reminds me that I stand in perpetual need of God’s wisdom to help me live authentically in such trying times. There are so many voices and forces attempting to put foreign words in my mouth or colonize my imagination, distorting what I believe God’s kingdom to be. Words like mercy, forgiveness, forbearance, hospitality, and understanding evaporate in the heat of extremism, retributive forms of “justice,” and tribalism. I find myself praying words inspired by Thomas Merton’s famous prayer, confessing to God, “I do not really know myself.”

As it turns out, living in divine dependency is both foundational to what it means to be authentically human and—according to the Book of Proverbs—is the beginning of wisdom. To live as though we don’t need God is to put ourselves in the place of God, which will always lead to our destruction. We were made to live in relation to God and through God with one another. God meets us at the point where our need for him expresses itself, for God’s “power is made perfect in weakness.” This does not solve all the myriad problems that plague our world, but it does help me navigate the path ahead of me, as I wait expectantly (and actively) for the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

Praying for wisdom to know God’s will in a given situation and courage to act on this knowledge reminds me that ultimately what God wants from me is my trust that he is working through time and history to bring about his purposes on Earth. This belief—that God’s Kingdom will come on Earth as it is in Heaven—is all I need to freely act with courage in my time, to live in love and mercy, to respond to hatred and ignorance with grace, and to reject all forms of extremism save one: love.

As the Abbey of Iona bears witness, I may not live to see the fullness of God’s Kingdom before I die. If our track record is any indication, I am quite sure I will not. To paraphrase Archbishop Rowan Williams, we often ask exasperatedly when Jesus will return and set everything right but fail to ask if we are truly ready to receive the gifts of his kingdom. While God’s kingdom tarries, I am called to pray daily for the wisdom and courage to live faithfully and humanely in our broken world. And when I lack the words to pray, as I often do, the Spirit prays for me “with sighs too deep for words.” And when all else fails, I can pray the words my savior taught me:

“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial."