Oval Office Prayer Sessions

Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

This prayer session was March 5, eleven days ago.

It was one week after the President had murdered the leader of Iran and his wife, daughter and niece, along with nearly 40 other Iranian officials, and incidentally also killed 175 mostly children at an elementary school, and launched us into our latest Middle East war of choice.

It was two months after the President had kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife, in a criminal operation that killed more than 100 people.

The prayers were offered up after months of the President’s sinking of boats around the world that his White House says were smuggling drugs, attacks that have killed about 157 people; and after a year in which the President has also bombed Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The gathered faith leaders offer up amens as one of them asks for the Lord’s grace and protection over President Trump, and also over America’s armed forces, and concludes with a request that God “give our president the strength that he needs to lead our nation as we come back to one nation under God.”

And that’s it.

No call for peace.

Not even a hint of a plea for peace.

Not asking that the Lord help with wisdom, or with making good choices, or remembering to be merciful. Just take care of the troops and make the President strong as he does whatever he’ll do next, and thank you Lord for your attention to this matter.

The faith leaders could have taken inspiration from Pope Leo — the first-ever American Pope of the Catholic Church — who led his New Year’s Day Mass thus:

“Let us all pray together for peace: first, among nations bloodied by conflict and suffering, but also within our homes, in families wounded by violence or pain.”

But for the kind of faith leader who gets a White House invite, apparently a prayer’s contents don’t matter, as long as one can post it on Instagram.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites,
for they love to pray standing in the synagogues
and on the street corners to be seen by others.
Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
— Matthew 6:5