Hour of Prayer Today

One of my favorite passages in the Gospels is when Jesus is coming down the mountain with a few of his disciples. They have just experienced a vision of Jesus with Moses and Elias and their spirits are high. They come down to find a man begging the other disciples of Jesus to cure his young son who is possessed with evil spirits, which today we might call a serious mental illness. The disciples cannot cure the boy and turn to Jesus for help. Jesus talks with the father and then drives out the demons from the son. Afterward the disciples asked him why they could not drive out the evil spirits from the boy. Jesus responds by saying: “This spirit can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.”

Marquette University is possessed with the evil spirits of militarism. For 44 years students and others have been trying to drive out these demons each Wednesday in Lent. For the fourth year in a row we are having an hour of prayer and fasting on the campus of Marquette University. Today we had an hour of prayer in the lobby of the Marquette University Raynor Memorial Library.

Four years ago, at our first hour of prayer at the same place, security and police were called in to get us out. We were not arrested and four years latter there was not even a security guard in sight. We have gone from being annoying to the MU administration to being ignored by them. After all these years our message, although the wording has changed, stays the same: Marquette, Be Faithful to the Gospel, No Longer Host Departments of Military Sciences. Today our wording of this message was: “Marquette Teaches Killing* (* Marquette University Undergraduate Bulletin -Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), p. 129–132)

The results of our hour of prayer cannot be seen right away but it was as a friend just wrote me recently “just being with others with shared concerns is a source of strength. “ Perhaps this “prayer and fasting” of our day will encourage and strength us in our attempt to dismiss the demons of military at Marquette University. We did not do much fasting in an hour but we certainly did pray. We pray that prayers works and there will be an end to Marquette teaching killing.

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