Thoughts from today’s prayer hike: little/long homily from da hills!

Nice place for a prayer walk today! Great place to pray for this very ethnically diverse city to symbolize dignity and creative collaboration or even, companionship or friendship in love, among all types of peoples. In times of great division, nice praying for unity among the peoples.
Things always start in prayer because it’s where you see from. You see Jesus always sneaking off to the lonely place of prayer, before “doing” things.
Today, kept seeing a vision of unity with the splendor of diversity as a starting point. If we can’t spiritually imagine one another as a human family, we can’t labor to incarnate it.
Nice to have a nearby high place to pray from today (love this hill and neighborhood of great racial and generational diversity), and listen, which is most of what prayer is for me. (That passage where we meet Samuel, coming down the mountain….so many mountains of prayer and exchange in scriptures…)
Maybe this particular city is meant to creatively teach/model about ethnic companionship and spiritual familyhood.
This specific city has always historically spoken of diversity and collections of ethnicity, but maybe it can also speak of the family of humanity now. Not just tolerance, but being family, cousins to one another. That seems to be one of the highest metaphors, and needs now-that we see one another as relatives, all of us globally!
St Peter got up, early on, and gave a simple word of welcoming the other nations (ethnos and people groups all all sorts!) into a spiritual family! Even at pentecost, it was the beginning of the message (the confusion of tongues or division of languages was reversed, or began to be so!)—all these different types of people were invited in! That hasn’t changed.
Welcome back home all you who were exiled foreigners, which is everyone, is one of the core messages of the gospels. We are all strangers and foreigners, and all welcomed back home. That really is good and needed news.
And it seems, that at least with Jesus He went out of His way to find the most foreign foreigner to welcome! Whose the one everyone hates the most, let’s make sure they get invited to the party, was the way of His Heart. That’s so basic. Anyways….prayer helps us incarnate this living orientation towards others. That’s one of its gifts for our own transformation of heart. And know, that racism is really at root a human heart problem. To change it, you must renovate the heart. And prayer starts with the heart!

Sacred exchange happens in high places so we can see what to be doing in the valleys. Prayer offers overviews. Geography symbolizes these rarefied communion spaces. It’s also good to go up high, when it is very noisy in the valleys!
This is why people build altars there, or rituals of exchange between what is above and below (studied this in cross religious studies in school! Fun anthropological study actually about religious use of symbolic spaces). It matters what we do on hills and mountains. The sermon on the mount is still the center of the NT in my opinion, but anyways…what i was seeing today, was something about what it means to be a house of prayer for all nations, which is one definition of church.
How can we symbolize that in our times, and be part of that living temple (or prayer chapel for one another) of welcome!
It was fun praying my way into it. If we ourselves, as St Paul taught are a living temple, then we are also a house of prayer for all nations! A high and safe place of exchange and encounter with the Divine! Isn’t that what priesthood is?! Where human meets divine through symbolic activities?
One of my favorite topics of study. What true priesthood really is! Right now, we are priesting for more than racial reconciliation, we are priesting towards seeing one another as actual family.
Prayer is also often the “scenic route”. I always am surprised by flowers along the way there. Today felt like a sky wilderness up top, traced to in floral explosions of life. Hiking is cool, prayer hiking is even more richly textured with meaning! I love prayer hiking! I learn so much in prayer, especially in high places. Wisdom seems to dwell on rivers, ridges and rims! And on the heights!
Anyhow, just sharing some insights from the heights today! Blessings….sorry for the length, but prayer is a long trail and trial at times, but, maybe all of life is just a prayer walk in the end. At least, it makes hiking more meaning-filled! Glad i went on a prayer hike today, gave me some hope for our times! Now, i really know what to be praying about!