Sorting through the boxes of books I brought from Ohio to Texas, I unpacked a slender volume a friend gave me a few years ago. It’s a collection of prayers by Reverend Peter Marshall, onetime pastor of Washington D.C.’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and more famous as the chaplain of the United States Senate from 1947 until his sudden death on 26 January 1949, at the age of forty-six. Many testimonials suggest Marshall, a man of delightful wit, practical faith, and unobtrusive piety was loved by the senators. His final prayer, written just hours before his death, was read to the Senate by the Reverend Dr. Clarence Cranford on 27 January 1949.
It was just a week after President Harry Truman’s inauguration. The Missourian had defeated Thomas E. Dewey the previous November in a victory that surprised many. The outcome was forever memorialized in the iconic photo of the victorious Truman holding a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune bearing the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Biographers say Dewey would seldom mention the 1948 election, though he apparently believed his failure to pursue a more aggressive campaign, in which he answered Truman’s false portrayal of the republican’s political philosophy, had helped cost him the election.
Three months after Truman’s re-election, many were still disappointed Dewey had lost. In this context, Marshall produced his final prayer for the Senate. The prayer opens with these words:
Deliver us, our Father, from futile hopes and from clinging to lost causes, that we may move into ever-growing calm and ever-widening horizons.
We may never know all Marshall had in mind in his prayer, but I can imagine he envisioned the disappointed voters accepting their loss and resolving to work with their former opponents as Americans who had shared in the remarkable process of choosing the nation’s leader, envisioned those from both sides eschewing name-calling and demonizing while learning to respect one another, and envisioned all Americans striving to move beyond the difficult days just past (the Depression and WWII).
Maybe we should offer such a prayer seventy years later.
