A few months later, at our graduation dinner and dance (the equivalent of our “promâ€), the president of the student council asked me, with about a minute’s notice, to offer a prayer before the dinner began. I was class valedictorian as well as leader of the only Christian group at the school, so I didn’t feel I could refuse, so I prayed a generic prayer to “God†and asked for the most general of blessings–but my qualms were growing.
And that’s the last time I’ve said yes. The University of Manitoba asked me a few times to pray at their convocation, as did the University of British Columbia when I came out here. And by then, I’d made up my mind. Prayer is a wonderful thing, and too wonderful to be a sort of vestigial gesture to Canada’s past or a way of adding a bit of extra solemnity to a secular occasion.
Worse, it marginalizes a lot of people: people who don’t believe in God, people who don’t believe in the particular kind of deity being prayed to, and people who do believe in God of that sort and don’t like the idea of an all-purpose prayer on behalf of an institution that otherwise pays no serious attention to God’s Word in its operations–such as the University of British Columbia, or my high school basketball team, or my friend’s company.
Do I hear an Am…eeek:^) Yes, some of us have thought deeply about this, we just don’t articulate our reasoning as well as Dr. Stackhouse.
The rest here.
The remark puts into sharp relief the difference between
the Canadian and American ways of life and the
social fabric of each nation.
There are members of my extended family that are very serious about their religion, and I am most certainly an atheist, as are my kids.
My nephew insists on a prayer or grace before we eat at other homes, my kids and I just stay quiet with our heads up. However, at my house, when the the extended family gathers, instead of a grace or prayer, I give a toast at the start of the meal instead, toasting the cause of the occasion, and those who are attending.
Cheers!
The pharisees liked to ‘make a show of things’ and claim the limelight in the process.
Discernment tells you when its the time and place to be open and openly.
Didn’t Christ have a word or two to say about public prayer? Ah, yes, Matthew 6:6. How do they get around that?
A clear and inconvenient word or two for power brokers.
Luke 6:28 must also be hard to get around.
Ah yes, that’s been gotten around with ‘imprecatory prayer.’