After Communion, as the choir began the simple Taizé chant Adoramus te, Christe, I found myself praying for a mother a few pews ahead of me who had recently buried her son. As the chant swelled into a crescendo, it occurred to me that I was surely not the only one in the church praying for her at that moment. I felt those prayers almost physically, like connective tissue, invisible arteries forming channels throughout the congregation, carrying and compounding life within the Body of Christ.
This integrating spirit of prayer could not be more different from the disintegrating spirit of division and outrage that so often engulfs us. Spend any time online and you encounter it: venom, accusation, indignation at a fever pitch. Even former pockets of consensus are turning on one another, fracturing into smaller and smaller factions.
