Praying for peace and other half-minded thoughts (2013)

Is there room for half-baked ideas, even half-vast ones, in a discussion of worship?

Let’s see.

* Praying for peace at mass is a good idea, but for an “end to violence” or even the specific “end to violence in Chicago”? Really? Who is kidding whom?

Praying for that is praying for the end of the world, which will be a wonderful thing, to be sure, what with Jesus returning in glory. His earliest followers prayed for that. But we might add an Augustinian “not yet.”

How about “less violence”? Or “fewer killings on our mean streets”? Something we can take seriously without calling for an end to life as we know it.

* Among social-justice issues, why do we never hear about vote-stealing? Never stole one myself or saw one stolen, though I was sorely tempted in the class-president election at Loyola U. in 1949. But I read about it and at times work up some blue-ribbon indignation.

Point is, why not expand social-justice discussion to troubles behind the obvious —  poverty and the like — into political corruption, which is pretty obvious at that and does poor people no good and like everything else that’s bad affects them most of all. Vast idea there.