Price of Gasoline, Energy and Prayer
by Daniel O’Rourke • Cassadaga, NY

Have you ever heard of Rocky Twyman and his Pray at the Pump group? Twyman from Rockville, Maryland is a community organizer and a Seventh Day Adventist. He and some of his followers have held group prayer meetings at gasoline stations as far away as San Francisco. Typically, Twyman and a half dozen others join hands around gasoline pumps and pray for lower gas prices.

Twyman began this prayer movement on April 23. According to the AAA that day the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded was $3.53. As I submit this column the national average is $4.02 and rising. (Locally, it is much higher). Many, myself included, would conclude that Pray at the Pump is not working. Undeterred, Twyman says that prayer does not demand instant answers and continues praying. Evidently, Twyman believes he will have greater success with the deity than President Bush did with Saudi Arabia’s House of Saud.

By this time you may have guessed I do not think prayer is going to bring gas prices down. The soaring cost of gasoline is a disaster for the working poor and middle class. It’s a bread and butter issue. In the long run, however, we need alternate energy sources more than lower prices at the pump. Hopefully, this pain will be short and bring long-term gain. We should be seeking hard solutions to this problem not just gimmicks to take a few cents off the price. We need a visionary energy policy. Lower prices would prompt us to drive more, drive faster and more frequently. We cannot do that. The earth just does not have enough crude for the expanding world demand.

Political action and political courage could have solved our energy problem years ago, but up to now Congress has demonstrated little of both. We need more alternate energy sources, more stringent CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards; we need more extensive public transit and safer ground transportation; we need more biofuels that don’t diminish the food supply, more hybrid cars -- and we need electric cars.

In fact we once had electric cars; in 1966 General Motors marketed the EV-1 in California. It was the first commercially available electric car. It required no gasoline and could be recharged by plugging it in at home. It could run pollution free for about 90 miles. That was sufficient for the 30-mile daily drive of ninety percent of California car owners. The rest could recharge their cars at battery parks.

The 2006 film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” tells the whole sad, sordid story. Greed and self-interest prevailed over the common good. The short answer to the movie’s title question is that the auto and oil companies killed the electric car. The more complex story is that the automobile manufacturers and oil industry colluded with the federal and California State governments to kill it. Even people who loved their cars could not keep them. GM had leased about a thousand EV-1s, but they were all repossessed and shredded. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released the film on DVD. Rent it; it’s worth seeing, but it’s not entertaining. It should make us furious. The movie should steel our wills to work towards a rational energy solution. God’s not going to solve our energy mess; we are.

I was watching cable television a month or so ago when the Democratic presidential candidates were asked about their religious faith. An interviewer asked Senator Barak Obama, “Do you believe God intervenes in human history?” Frankly, I forget his answer. It wasn’t very memorable. I found myself talking back to the television set. (I do that a lot these days). “Yes,” I said. “Of course, God intervenes but he does it through us.” We have to do the work. It’s John Kennedy’s statement, ‘Let us go forth asking God’s blessing but remembering that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.’ That’s good theology -- and good politics.”

About the same time as Obama’s interview, the media ran a tragic story of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl who died from diabetes after her mother chose to pray for her instead of taking her to a doctor. An autopsy indicated she died from a lack of insulin, a condition easily treated medically. The girl had been ill for about a month but her mother, believing that healing comes directly from God, relied entirely on prayer.

That is not only a tragedy; it’s a travesty of what prayer should be and what God is. When most of us pray, we ask for things. That’s understandable enough, but too often it’s also an excuse. An excuse for not doing our part -- like going to the doctor or marketing an electric car. The addict with COPD or lung disease who prays for a cure, but keeps on smoking is kidding herself. A society that kills the electric car is kidding itself. JFK was right, “Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Unitarian minister Lon Roy Call tells us, “Prayer does not change things. Prayer changes people, and people change things.” It’s clearly up to us to extricate ourselves from this energy mess.

I’m not against prayer. I wish there were more of it, but I see it as a grateful attitude before the Wonder of Life. To use Anne Lamot’s words, prayer should be more “thank you” than “give me.” And prayer at the pump or anywhere should never be an excuse for us not doing our part. To free ourselves from this energy crisis, from this quicksand into which our economy is fast sinking, we don’t need prayer for lower prices. We need political courage and political action. Let’s pray and work for that.

Daniel O’Rourke is a married Catholic priest, retired from the Administration at SUNY Fredonia. His newspaper column appears in the Observer, Dunkirk, NY on the second and fourth Thursday each month. He has published The Spirit at Your Back, a book of his previous columns. You may purchase it or send comments to orourke@netsync.net.