11 February 2004 - Santa Lucia, Honduras Dear friends in our supporting congregations, I spent three weeks in Cuba last month, working on a series of articles that will appear in United Methodist publications in coming months. Cuba is the geographic focus of the ecumenical schools of mission this summer, and my writing and photos will help folks understand what’s happening on the island these days. Cuba is a fascinating place, and I encourage your congregations to use the schools of mission to get to better know our neighbors. From the dozens of interviews I did, one comment still sticks in my mind. I was talking with Carlos Kamps, the general secretary of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Cuba, and near the end of our talk I asked him what the Cuban church needed from its sisters and brothers in the United States. I confess I expected an appeal to help end the U.S. government’s anachronistic and immoral blockade against Cuba, a common refrain from Cubans of all backgrounds. Or an entreaty to persuade the U.S. government to let Cuban religious leaders visit the United States, something Washington has repeatedly denied in recent years. Or thankfulness for the support that the United Methodist Church and Church World Service have provided lately to health care programs throughout Cuba. Yet Carlos responded by talking about prayer. “Although it may sound foolish to some, as a pastor and a religious leader I think what we need most are your prayers. When you open up to God, you open up to others. A spirit of prayer will help you understand us better, understand our people and our churches,” he said. Prayer is at the center of real mission, because real prayer invites us to listen. To God. To our sisters and brothers. Real prayer deletes from our agenda our preconceived notions of how to respond to others and invites us into new adventures of mission. Prayer makes me curious. The more I pray for someone, the more curious I am about them, their life, their family, their personal and social struggles. The more I pray for someone, be they Cuban or Iraqi or just someone who lives across the street from me but who is different than me, the more I want to know about them, the easier I can learn from them. They cease being cardboard cutouts, stereotypes of their group, and become real living, breathing people “with hopes and dreams as true and fair as mine.” When I really pray earnestly for someone else, particularly someone whom I’ve been told to distrust or hate, God’s grace undercuts the encouraged tendency to convert that person into an object, which is the first step in doing violence to them. Praying for someone, really praying, stops violence in its tracks. Prayer thus fosters authentic, effective mission. Rather than responding to the world with what we think is best, a paternalistic urge to help “those people,” prayer invites us to listen and thus respond with what real people really need. Prayer helps us to discover God’s take on the world, something which, not surprisingly, is often at odds with what our government or church or media have told us. Prayer helps us discern a form of mission that invites us deeper into the pain of the world. Prayer helps open us up to the world, as it really is, not as we–afflicted by insecurity and selfishness–might imagine it to be. Prayer complicates our lives, as it pulls us out from behind our comfortable cultural filters and thrusts us forward to encounter Jesus in those who are hungry, alone, or oppressed. Thanks for your prayer for our family here in Central America. As we join with you in real prayer, may we together listen more, opening ourselves up to better understand and love the world God has created. Shalom, Paul Jeffrey