“What is prayer?” That question was recently posed to me by a new catechumen just beginning his preparation for baptism through the RCIA. It’s a question that is well worth the time for any Christian to consider. Prayer is as essential to our spiritual life as oxygen is to our physical life, and just like the air we breathe, it’s easy to take prayer for granted.
In the wake of the French Revolution, the triplet of “liberty, equality, fraternity” emerged as a moral compass for the secular society. Something similar has happened today with “equity, diversity, inclusion.” For most pundits and social activists, at least in the West, these three values function as fundamental norms, self-evident moral truths of absolute value that ought to guide our behavior at both the personal and institutional level. But this cannot be right. For whatever plays that determining role must be good in itself, valuable in every and any circumstance, incapable of being positioned by a higher value. Neither equity, diversity nor inclusion enjoy these prerogatives, and this can be shown readily enough.