An Invitation
Since 1983 people have participated in THE ANNUAL FORTY DAYS OF PRAYER AND FASTING FOR THE TRUTH OF GOSPEL NONVIOLENCE, JULY 1-AUGUST 9. This is an invitation to offer you the opportunity to participate in this time of prayer and fasting to call the Churches of Christianity back to Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as an irremovable part of His Way as revealed in the Gospels.
To participate, just make the decision before God to participate at whatever degree you can according to your situation in life. No effort of Christlike love in the eyes of God is too small and every effort will be honored by Him. To employ even 15 seconds of your life’s time to serve or help others, simply because they need help, is an act of Christlike love. Eight and a half billion people—being daily and relentlessly attacked by the power of the evil of violence and enmity, which unconquerably roams the earth depriving all humanity of peace, happiness and life—are searching for the help needed to authentically liberate them from this curse.
Christlike Love in the smallest act is Love in the image and likeness of the Love that is the Love that is God, who is Love. Therefore the littlest act of Christlike love possesses the Spirit, Power and Wisdom of God, and hence is temporally pragmatic and of Eternal value. Indeed, it is through Christlike Love, and though Christlike love alone, that God promises to save humanity from its own evil and its self-destruction. All other liberation processes are dross, the sound and the fury signifying nothing and doing nothing to free human beings from the furnace of agony and evil in which they are born, live and are ceaselessly crucified.
This Annual Forty Day Fast for Gospel Nonviolence at root is about calling people to participate in the only effective revolution that exists, the revolution of Christlike Love, the only revolution that can save all people—not just the people of my class, my party, my ethnic group, my nation, my family, my…— forever from evil and death and all their horrendous consequences.
To be human is to desire at the deepest recess of one’s being to be a revolutionary, that is, to desire to help change, to help remove everything that keeps human beings generation after generation locked into and suffering terribly in this quagmire of evil and death, of violence, enmity and fear in which all persons exists and from which no technological or empirical progress can free them. But, what is the Way out, where lies the exit, for one and all?
Jesus, the Messiah of Nonviolent Love of Judaism, the Word of God who is Love “made flesh,” the Savior of Suffering Love of the world reveals the Way out. First, He reveals it to all Jews and then to all humanity. It consists simply of this: “Follow me. Love as I have love.”
Since Jesus when on earth absolutely rejected violence by His words and deeds and proclaimed by His words and deeds, “Love your enemies,” to “Follow me,” to “Love as I have loved,” can only means to live a life in minute matters and in great undertakings committed to the Nonviolent Love of all in the model of Jesus.
Thus this Forty Day Time of Prayer and/or Fasting is a moment to call oneself and all others to the only revolution that genuinely liberates, the only one that ends in Eternal Life, Happiness and Peace with the Eternal God who is Eternally Love.
Think about it. And, if you find truth and love here, come join us this July1 to August 9 and help Jesus renew the past, present and future face of the earth by the power of His Holy Spirit of Christlike love acting through you in time and space.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org
https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!
