| Cathleen Falsani

GODSTUFF:

MERCY AND HOPE: PRAYING FOR JILL CARROLL

“I can’t even look at that, it’s too awful,” my editor said, turning her head away from a bank of television monitors and covering her eyes with her hands earlier this week when coverage of a car chase in Houston gave way to photos of Jill Carroll, our 28-year-old colleague from the Christian Science Monitor who was kidnapped Jan. 7 in Iraq.

The people who are holding her captive have threatened to kill Jill later today unless the U.S. military releases all Iraqi women in its custody, something that the U.S. military is usually disinclined to do.

We don’t negotiate with terrorists, they say. It’s a wise, difficult policy.

And in situations like this, it’s absolutely gut-wrenching.

I don’t know Jill. In fact, I’d never seen her byline or read anything she’d written before last weekend. But she is my sister, my colleague, a fellow idealist who believes that what she writes might have the power to make the world a better place.

For someone. For everyone.

I wish it were true that every kidnapping, suicide bombing or life lost to war — no matter where or which “side” they’re on — affected me equally.

They should. They don’t.

For reasons I won’t spend time and space deconstructing right now, sometimes it’s easier to feel empathy for someone with whom you share a commonality, be it gender, race, religion, age, culture or, in this case, vocation.

When I look at the images of Jill — frightened, tired and alone but for her gun-wielding, masked captors — I see myself and my dear colleagues here in the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom.

How must our friends at the Christian Science Monitor be feeling?

How would I feel if those were images of Annie or Maudlyne or Lori or Monifa flashing across CNN, Fox News and Al-Jazeera? What would I do? What could I do?

The first and last line of defense for many of us would be prayer. I’d pray. We’d all pray, even those of us who don’t really believe in prayer. Or in God.

I’ve prayed for Jill this week. I’m praying for her right now. So are thousands of people around the world.

The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908 by a woman, Mary Baker Eddy, who believed passionately in the power of prayer. The paper is not a religious publication — it carries only one explicitly religious column each day — despite being owned by the church Eddy founded, the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston.

But the paper has an implicitly spiritual mission, one that by all accounts Jill — a young woman from Ann Arbor, Mich., who moved to the Middle East a few years ago because she wanted to understand the region and humanize the lives of its inhabitants — believes in with all her heart: “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”

According to one of Eddy’s biographers, she insisted on her paper being named the “Christian Science” Monitor because it was a kind of promise, that “no human situation [is] beyond healing or rectification.”

The words printed below are not mine. They belong to an anonymous colleague of Jill’s at the Christian Science Monitor.

They might not be the exact words I’d have chosen, but the heart of what the writer is saying is what I’d want to say were I in his or her shoes.

Do not lose hope. Do not despair. Believe that change can happen. Pray.

For Jill. For her family. For her colleagues. For her captors. For mercy.

For all of us.

****************************************************

From The Christian Science Monitor

PRAYERS FOR A REPORTER IN IRAQ

“I ask myself, What will I — an avid consumer of news and a newly minted fan of Jill’s work, but far from the scene of events — do with these remaining hours and minutes? I resolve: I will not squander them. I will not give these moments over to fear, to despair, and definitely not over to anger or vengeance. But can I consecrate these moments to prayer? Yes, I can.

“Prayer has too often proved to be too powerful in my own life for me to neglect it now. I can pray, I do pray for every hostage, for their protection while in captivity, and for their safe and speedy release.

“I turn to the Scriptures. One dimension of the Almighty’s nature suddenly stands out boldly. He is a deliverer. Times without number, it seems, He delivers His children from famine to plenty, from captivity to freedom, from illness to well-being, from harm to safety. He is a deliverer.

“Both the Old and the New Testaments spill over with accounts illustrating this. He does not turn His back. He does not forsake some for the sake of others. He does not arrive too late. He delivers to safety. As I ponder this, I intuitively sense the need is not for Him to become what He already is, but for me to become more deeply aware of Him.

“I know that as I understand more of His power and presence, that understanding will fuel my prayers. That understanding will help me not squander moments on despair. It will help me throw my mental weight on the side of solutions, on the side where I glimpse a bit more of the great deliverer at work today. And every prayerful glimpse tells.

“St. Paul certainly faced this kind of challenge. You perhaps recall his story from the Scriptures. Paul, a prayerful man if ever there was one, was a captive traveling with other captives, aboard a ship headed to Italy.

“The seas were heavy, the winds tempestuous, the ship in peril. A kind of double peril faced Paul and his fellow captives, though. In addition to the storm clouds, ominous orders hung over them. ‘The soldiers’ counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of them should swim out, and escape,’ say the Scriptures. Then they add, ‘But the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept them from their purpose. …” (Acts 27:42, 43) And they all made it safely to land.

“What was at work forwarding Paul’s deliverance? God’s love for His offspring delivered them — delivers us — from hate. His benevolence delivers from evil. His mercy from injustice. Wonderful news doesn’t make these already–true facts true. Terrible news doesn’t unmake them. My task is to hew to these facts in prayer. Then these facts, these spiritual truths, reshape events for the better.

“Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy once wrote: ‘The power of God brings deliverance to the captive. No power can withstand divine Love’ (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, page 224). I seize this in prayer.

“It brings me reassurance because as I pray along these lines, I realize that this delivering power is at work at this moment not only on behalf of Jill but on behalf of every hostage, on behalf of every Iraqi that is living through this violence every day. The Lord does indeed bring deliverance to every captive. Right now is a very good time to realize that.”

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. (Psalms 32:7)

Courtesy of Christian Science Monitor