Keeping Faith

Sometimes life just delivers a blow that knocks one out. Your breath is taken away, your spirit feels broken, and your heart feels irreparably damaged. I have been sitting daily this week in the presence of those who are living with this destitution. Broken trust, broken trust, broken bodies have all brought devastation to people of faith, trying to live lives of wholeness for themselves and the rest of their community.

In a joyful surprise this last Monday evening I heard Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian mother and peace activist, who on Friday was named a Nobel Peace Prize winner, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, and Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni human rights leader. Leymah is a compelling, luminous presence, a “traditionally built” woman with flair and savvy. In an interview with Rev. Gwinne Guibord, she told her story of responding to a call in a dream to get together the women of Liberia, first those in her Christian church, and then their Muslim sisters to pray for and then to mobilize for peace during the horrific war  in Liberia for fourteen years under the presidency of Charles Taylor. She described the way that the civil war terrified her, terrorized the entire nation, a blow that knocked her outstripping away all hope and wisdom completely. Yet into that devastation came the dream, came the call to begin to work for peace. She went to her pastor with the dream, and told him that he needed to get some women together to pray for peace. His response to her was: “The dream belongs to the dreamer.” And so she began.

In her lively description of her journey, laced with humor and verve, she often referred to moments when she lost her faith, the setbacks, the resistance, the breadth and depth of the sexism and classism. Yet, she spoke equally freely about the prayers and support of the community of women. There is a prayer meeting begun in those days that is still going on every Tuesday at noon where Muslim and Christian woman pray for peace. When she stepped out to interrupt the peace talks with the warlords when they finally came, she knew that she had a band of prayer warriors behind her, covering and sustaining her. The work she did was communal, inter-faith, deeply rooted in prayer.  She began to work with her colleagues to help African women become empowered by owning and expressing their own beauty. They took Queen Esther from Hebrew scripture as their model. When one lost faith, the rest had her back in love, prayer and vision.

The knock-out blows to faith can set me a-reel. Leymah teaches me, among many other things, that the life of the Spirit is one that needs to be shared. Left to my own mental and emotional wanderings, I can grind myself into the stuck places of disbelief, distraction and despair all alone. In the presence of people of faith, I can begin once again to say, “Christ, I believe; help my unbelief.”

Leymah said in closing Monday night, (before any of us knew about the Prize to come on Friday) that she does not see herself as heroic, just living her life in a quest for survival, and following the call of God to do what she does. The fruit of her labor she considers to be not a right to which she is entitled, but God’s favor in response to her answer to that holy call for the sake of herself, her own family and the other women in Africa.

Spirituality is sometimes characterized as a silent and solitary way of living in the world. Leymah embodies another dimension, that of leading and partnering with community to enact the things that make for peace. When I lose faith, it may be that the Spirit is gentling me into the conversations and gatherings and company that help restore my soul and energize me for the confrontations into which I am to speak peace.

Note: To know more, watch “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” on TV this fall; or read Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War.