During "new business", President-elect Steve Gould related some of the excitement he felt after attending PETS (President-elect Training) down in Valley Forge two weekends ago. He noted with chagrin that it has taken him this long to learn what a great international service organization Rotary is. He asked board members to consider that young people are attracted to the service opportunities Rotary provides and not to the "club" trapppings like singing and ceremonial acts like invocations,
Several board members expressed agreement and a willingness to consider changes to how we do things together as long as we were not "throwing the baby out with the bath water." (Please note: there are no changes currently being made!) There seemed to be some surprise that our opening invocation did not have to be a formal prayer and that a moment of silence could be requested.
So the question arose "how can we honor the diversity of faiths and beliefs represented in Rotary when offering an invocation?" Perhaps, my classification as “clergy” makes me uniquely qualified to answer. I have thought about this question from time to time as our club has had members who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim as well as agnostic, atheist, seeker, humanist, and “other”. Frankly, anyone at any time may find himself or herself lapsed or questioning the faith of family or personal history. Research also tells us that young people, who know themselves as spiritual people, do not want to be part of any institutional, historical, organized religion.
As I do not find this to be problematic for our club, I was surprised to read in the letters to the April 2018 the Rotarian magazine, one Jewish Rotarian who expressed his discomfort because “the invocation at my Rotary club meeting every week...invariably is given in the name of “Jesus Christ, our Lord.”” (“A club for all faiths”, page 6)
My answer, in a nutshell, is that our best practice is to offer our invocations the same way that porcupines make love: carefully!
Rotary International serves, grows and thrives because of the diversity of people and nations and traditions among its membership. We honor each other by taking time to prepare when it is our turn to begin our meeting with a prayer. Everyone should feel comfortable to pray from his or her own tradition and practice. There is no prior constraint unless it comes from consideration of the Four-Way Test: is it the TRUTH, FAIR to all concerned, will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS, will it be BENEFICIAL to all who listen?
All the major world faiths have a version of the Golden Rule: do to others the good that you yourself hope to receive. This means that if you do not want another to proselytize and push their faith on you, that you don’t do it either. When I meet someone whose faith is different from mine I try to begin a conversation with the goals of offering hospitality and building understanding.
If there is a danger to this practice of asking our gracious, loving, creator God to draw near, it is in allowing ourselves to be complacent, overly busy people who are lackadaisical or indifferent. I do not think this is an issue for our club, as I see members offering words from scripts on papers held in their hands as we bow our heads. They have thumbed through their prayer books, surfed the internet and looked in books of poetry for words of inspiration.
To help you stay both fresh and clear when it is your turn to offer our prayer, consider the three basic prayer forms described by the spiritual writer Anne Lamott. She says they are: Help!! Thank you, thank you! and Wow!!!!
Please know that I am very willing to talk with anyone who has questions about this article or wants more help in crafting an invocation.