A deep, wounding experience of rejection

"At the heart of unemployment is a deep, wounding experience of rejection. You are not wanted. Your contribution is not valued. You feel as if someone has kicked you in the stomach every day, for months and months. In February 2009 a young woman in London said “It feels like being dumped fifty times a day”. This experience is profoundly de-stabilizing.

If unemployment is prolonged, you also lose an income, you lose a routine, you lose a network of other people, and you lose an identity …"

Revd Raymond Draper who, for many years, was the Chairman of CHUG (The Christians Unemployment Group) has prepared some very helpful resources on the issue and experience of unemployment. They can be found at http://www.chelmsford.anglican.org/unemployment.html and http://www.mile.org.uk/news.htm.

Praying may seem a strange response to unemployment and yet as well as thinking and acting, Raymond Draper is helping Churches to pray and to go on praying about unemployment. He writes that one of the problems we face about prayer is the very narrow view we take of it. It is seen as a last resort. Prayer is what you do when all else fails! At least that is better than not praying at all – but prayer is meant to be far more than this. It is meant to be a natural part of our life. Prayer is becoming aware of God, sharing in his life and sharing our life with him. It is not first of all telling God things, it is about becoming receptive enough to hear what God wants to tell us. So when we pray about unemployment we are first of all asking God what he is saying to us through the sufferings of so many ... we are painfully exposing ourselves to face the reality of this suffering and the reality of God’s will for our society.

Such prayer leads us first, not to righteous indignation, but to penitence; to sorrow that we are part of a society which tolerates, accepts, and uses such suffering for its own ends. So we are led to pray for those who bear the heavy burdens of unemployment and for all who seek to help and support them. Some of us certainly want to go praying for those able to influence the economy; our national leaders; and to pray that we shall see a new sense of compassion and new bold and imaginative policies that will overcome this problem. Campaigns and projects, therefore, are not divorced from prayer – they are its fruit and they must be linked to prayer if they are not to go awry. We need God’s help constantly if we are to create a just society where we love and honour one another.

Long ago, a German Pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who opposed Adolf Hitler and was executed) wrote of the need to link prayer and action. He said: “The task of discovering a new Gospel (and building a new society) is rooted in prayer and righteous action ... It is only in the spirit of prayer that any such work can be begun and carried through ...”

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