Religion: Extemporized Mediocrity

“Anyone acquainted with public prayer in American churches might well conclude that even ministers do not regard it as deserving any attention at all. Their public prayers often fall from their lips slipshod and haphazard, appalling illustrations of random, extemporized mediocrity.

“When one considers the quantity of public prayer, the number of people who come within its range, the meaning it might have, the atrocious carelessness with which its possible power is commonly handled, the irreverent nonchalance with which many stroll into and dally over it. one welcomes any serious endeavor to come to intelligent terms with it.”

Thus wrote Manhattan’s Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick in a foreword to The Practice of Public Prayer published last week by Dr. J. Hillis Miller, dean of students at Bucknell University. Like Dr. Fosdick, Dr. Miller believes that public prayer is today in a precarious state. Investigating Dr. Fosdick as an ablepublic supplicator. Dr. Miller finds that his prayers are formalized to suit the composite character of a large congregation. In 15 Sunday morning prayers he observes that Dr. Fosdick expresses “all the needs and desires he may be expected to express during the succeeding five years . . . for economic deliverance, devotion to the highest, glad and fresh faith, fruitfulness of the soul, integration of our lives,renewed aspirations, attunement to God, beauty, high thoughts, basic virtues, larger and higher visions, spiritual welfare and wholesomeness of life.”

Public prayers came into last week’s news from another quarter with the appearance of a 30-page collection of Prayers for Self and Society written by Rev. James Myers, Industrial Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, and published by the Y. M. C. A.’s General Board. Whether the result was any better than “extemporized mediocrity” was a matter of opinion but certainly no comparison could be made with the stately rhetoric of the Book of Common Prayer or the King James Bible.

Topical and straightforward, Mr. Myers’ prayers “are offered in the belief that the social gospel and the individual gospel are one.” For example, on Race Relations Sunday or following a lynching, he recommends the following:

0 God, how dare we lift our eyes to Thee, for we are guilty as a nation of tolerating the practice of vile mob murder of men. . . . Cleanse our hearts, we beseech Thee, of the dark sin of race prejudice. . . .

Briskly business-like is this “Miserere”:

From spending billions for battleships while the unemployed live upon a crust.

Good Lord, deliver us. . . .

From ever forgetting the forlorn figure of the unemployed; from failure to see that our social fabric is as shabby as his coat, and that our heads must bow in equal shame with his.

Good Lord, deliver us. . . .

Most of Author Myers’ prayers concern social matters. “For Slum Clearance” is definitely informative: Do Thou make us ashamed of our toleration of the slums, which in disproportionate measure continue to make criminals and prostitutes of many boys and girls who never had a chance. Reflecting the New Dealish attitude of the Federal Council of Churches, the prayer “For Labor” comes closest to striking a political note :

Help Thou the labor movement of our day. . . . Unite in high purpose the workers. . . . Guard their leaders from lust for personal power. Grant to labor the wisdom to seek a world of peace and plenty by means of organisation and the ballot, keeping their movement free from hate and violence.