Faiths Act

“More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

It’s mind-blowing that trillions of lifeless particles assemble and combine in such a way to create a living, growing, self-aware human being. I like how Bill Bryson puts it, “it is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”

We seem to be mysteriously more than the sum of our parts. In a similar way, single letters of an alphabet that are meaningless in isolation are brought together and arranged in such ways that create texts of indescribable beauty and historic influence. If the combination is just right, these texts come alive. At an atomic level, I’m made of the same stuff as a Mercedes and a bowl of cornflakes. And the Word of God, as found in various scriptures, is the peculiar combination of the same letters that we combine in different ways to order pizza and make small talk about the weather- infinitely more than the sum of its parts.

So what elevates one collection of letters and words above another?

More important than the skill or style with which a particular text is written, I think, is the context of its creation, what rhetorical criticism refers to as the text’s rhetorical situation, meaning the combination of persons, objects, events, relationships and the specific exigence that invites the utterance in the first place.

The same combination of letters and words may mean something completely different spoken by a different person, to a different audience, in a different place, at a different time, in response to a different event. They may mean much more or much less. How we say something, when and where we say it, and to whom matters. In many ways, it matters just as much as what we say.

Prayers for our Mothers Project

The “Prayers for Our Mothers” project seeks to create a space for a special, sacred collection of letters and words, a space where people can acknowledge the beauty and crucial value of the women and mothers of the world and can express the gratitude and appreciation they feel for their own mothers. In response to the current global context of maternal health, with a woman dying every 90 seconds from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, these words, powerful on their own, gain added potency and urgency.

Through this online interfaith exchange, the project hopes to bind together the hearts of the speakers and the listeners, and of the mothers we love because they are ours and the mothers we love because they are someone else’s. And in doing so it hopes to create a special, sacred collection of people who care about the women and mothers of the world enough to take action, however seemingly insignificant, to better their condition – a collection of people infinitely more than the sum of its parts.

To watch some of the “Prayers” and to find how to add your voice, visit our website.

Eric Farr, Faiths Act Fellow