[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12863-12864]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER

 Mr. ALLARD. Mr. President, on May 4, 2000 those attending the 
National Day of Prayer luncheon in Denver, Colorado got to hear an 
electrifying talk by Dr. Condoleezza Rice. I found the speech so 
moving, so inspiring that I wanted to share it with those who could not 
be in attendance that day to her remarks. ``Condi,'' as she likes to be 
called, grew up in Denver, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Denver 
University and has served our country in many ways including service to 
former President George Bush as a chief expert on Russia. I ask that 
her speech be printed in the Record.

         National Day of Prayer, Denver, Colorado, May 4, 2000

                       (By Dr. Condoleezza Rice)

       Thank you very much. It is indeed a delight to be with you 
     here in Denver for the Colorado Prayer Lunch. I do know quite 
     a few people in the room, and there are good friends here 
     from very far back in my history. I'm not going to tell you 
     who they are because I don't want you to go up to them and 
     ask them how I really was at fifteen or sixteen years old. 
     But it's awfully nice to back here--home in Denver.
       I bring you greetings from my family. My parents and I 
     moved to Denver when I was twelve years old, and this is just 
     a great place to live. I think the reason that it is such a 
     great place to live is events like this. You look around and 
     you see the love in the community, you see the strength in 
     the community. It's nice to be back.
       When I thought about what I'd like to talk with you about, 
     I immediately reflected on the fact that this is of course 
     our National Day of Prayer as well as the day for the 
     Colorado Prayer Luncheon. And I thought about spending a few 
     minutes with you talking about the relationship of personal 
     faith, to faith in a community, to strength and forward 
     movement in a community. Because very often we think about 
     where we would like the community to go, we think about where 
     we would like our leaders to take us. We very often forget 
     that strong communities are built person by person, step by 
     step, by the responsibility of each and every one of us. That 
     responsibility and that strength, I believe, can come from 
     many different sources, and certainly it comes from different 
     sources for different people. But for many of us, and perhaps 
     for most of the people in this room, it certainly relates to 
     deep and abiding faith in God, whatever one's religious 
     background. For me it comes from a deep and abiding faith in 
     Jesus Christ.
       Now I have to tell you that I was born into the church. I 
     didn't have much choice. In fact, on the day that I was born 
     which was a Sunday, at 11:48 my father was preaching a 
     sermon. He had been told on Friday night that his child 
     probably wasn't going to be born for a couple of days, so go 
     ahead on Sunday and preach the sermon. And my goodness when 
     he came out of the pulpit on Sunday, he had a little girl.
       We lived in the back of the church until I was three and 
     then moved into a parsonage. My grandparents were religious 
     people. I studied piano from the age of three. I could read 
     music before I could read. But the first song that I learned 
     was ``What a Friend We Have in Jesus.'' And then I learned to 
     play ``Amazing Grace,'' etc. etc.
       My grandfather was a deeply religious person. Indeed I have 
     a lot of heroes in my life, but Granddaddy Rice is perhaps 
     the most remarkable because you see back in about 1920 he was 
     a sharecropper's son in Ewtah, Alabama. One day he decided he 
     wanted to get book learning, heaven knows why. And so he 
     asked people how could a colored man go to college, and they 
     said, ``Well, you see if you could get to Stillman College 
     (which is this little Presbyterian college down the road) 
     then you could go to college there.'' So he saved up his 
     cotton, went to Stillman College, paid for his first year and 
     then the second year they said, ``Now how do you plan to pay 
     for your second year?'' And he said, ``Well, I've used all 
     the money I have.'' And they said, ``Well, you'll have to go 
     home,'' And he said, ``Well, how to those boys go to 
     college?'' They said, ``Well, you see they have what's called 
     a scholarship, and if you wanted to be a Presbyterian 
     minister, then you could have a scholarship too.'' My 
     grandfather said, ``You know, that's exactly what I had in 
     mind,'' and he became college educated, and my family has 
     been Presbyterian ever since.
       So I was born into the church. My earliest memories are of 
     Sunday school and choir practice and youth fellowship, and 
     indeed if you're a minister's child, you have some kind of 
     strange memories because you see when I heard that story 
     about Christ coming again, I figured when I was about six 
     years old that if he was going to come again anyway, He might 
     as well come to Westminster Presbyterian Church because that 
     would certainly help the flagging attendance in the summer. 
     And so I would pray, ``If you're going to come, Christ, come 
     to my father's church. He could use the help,'' You see you 
     had different ways of thinking about religion when you were a 
     preacher's child.
       But because I was born into the church, I never really 
     doubted the existence of God. I can tell you that I accepted 
     from the earliest years the whole mystery of the faith, the 
     birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection as truth. 
     Mine then is not a story of conversion to faith. The 
     existence of God was a given for me. That Jesus Christ was 
     His son was a given for me. But while mine is not a story of 
     conversion, it is a story of a journey to deepen my personal 
     faith, and I would imagine that for many of you, a story that 
     resonates, a story that has a familiar ring. You see, it's 
     easy when you are born to religious faith to take that faith 
     for granted, and not to deepen and to grow in it, not to 
     question, and to become comfortable with it.
       When we moved here to Denver, I was at Montview Boulevard 
     Presbyterian Church. I was in the choir. I met some members 
     of Montview Boulevard here today with whom I sang in the 
     choir. It was a wonderful church, a large church. And then I 
     moved to California, and for awhile I continued to go to 
     church as I had done every Sunday since I could remember. But 
     you know pretty soon things got busy. And so before you knew 
     it, Sundays were for something else. Maybe I had to work. 
     Maybe I had to do something about that lecture that I had to 
     give on Monday. I was always traveling because I'm a 
     specialist in international politics, so maybe I was in some 
     other time zone, and when I got home I was just too tired to 
     go to church. And slowly but surely my faith which I'd always 
     taken for granted was there, but it was rather in the deeper 
     recesses of my mind, not front and center in the way that I 
     lived my life daily.
       A funny thing happened in that period to me. One Sunday 
     morning when I knew I should have been in church, I was in 
     the Lucky Supermarket instead. And I was walking among the 
     spices buying food, and I'll never forget running into a 
     black man there. And if you know Palo Alto, that's a rare 
     occurrence anyway. And he told me he was buying some food for 
     his church picnic, and we talked a little, and then he looked 
     right at me and he said, ``Do you play the piano?'' And I 
     said ``Yes, I play the piano,'' And he said, ``You know my 
     church, Jerusalem Baptist Church down the road here just a 
     little bit, needs somebody to play the piano. Would you come 
     and play the piano for us?'' And so I did for several months 
     go and play the piano for Jerusalem Baptist Church. And I 
     thought, ``If that's not the long reach of the Lord into the 
     Lucky Supermarket on a Sunday morning, what is?'' But as a 
     result of going there and playing and getting involved again 
     with the church community, I began to see how much my faith, 
     which I'd taken for granted, was becoming unpracticed, that 
     it was no longer really becoming a part of the way that I 
     lived my daily life.
       And so I started seeking out a church home, and I found 
     Menlo Park Presbyterian in Menlo Park right next to Palo 
     Alto. And one of the first sermons that I heard at Menlo Park 
     Presbyterian Church just reached out and grabbed me because 
     it said where I was in my own faith. And it was the story of 
     the prodigal son. But it was the story of the prodigal son 
     told from the perspective of the older son, not from the son 
     who had to come home, but the son who had always been there. 
     And the minister talked about how the older son was really 
     appalled, angry, and couldn't quite understand why while be 
     had been there toiling in the fields and had been a good son 
     and had supported his family, why there was all this 
     excitement when the prodigal son came home.
       And I thought about it, and maybe what Christ was saying 
     here, what God was saying, was that the prodigal son who had 
     to be born again to this faith was being brought powerfully 
     back to his faith. While the older son who had always been 
     there doing what he

[[Page 12864]]

     was supposed to do but maybe just doing it in the most 
     routine fashion was losing what's most important about faith, 
     and that's the deepening and the fire that comes from having 
     it tested, from having to worry about it, from having to 
     think about it, from having to bat it around in your mind 
     from time to time so that it doesn't become stale. And I 
     suddenly saw myself as the elder son. And I thought at that 
     time, it's time to renew my faith and not to take it for 
     granted. And you know, it's a good thing that I did because I 
     was soon to learn why faith is so important in your daily 
     life.
       It was about a year and a half after coming back to my 
     faith that I lost my mother, and I can tell you that I could 
     not have gotten through that without a strong and robust 
     faith. You see the preparation for struggle that faith 
     accords you is not something that you can call on the day 
     that it happens. You have to have honed it, you have to have 
     worked at it, it has to have become a part of you. I began to 
     understand during that period of time when I really was 
     experiencing the peace that passeth all understanding, that 
     faith is honed in struggle, that Paul was absolutely right 
     when he wrote in Romans that we are justified in faith and 
     that struggle brings patience, and patience hope, and hope is 
     not disappointed. Because it is in that time of struggle that 
     we learn that we are resilient human beings, that we have at 
     our core the ability to rebound and to go on.
       Over the years, I have become more and more interested in 
     the stories of struggle--whether it is the death of a loved 
     one, whether it is what Colorado went through in Columbine, 
     whether it is the struggle that interestingly built Stanford 
     University. Do you know that Stanford University was built by 
     Governor and Mrs. Stanford to honor their only child who died 
     of typhoid at sixteen years old? And Mrs. Stanford writes in 
     her letters that she wanted to die too when her son and then 
     her husband died shortly thereafter, but she understood that 
     her faith was telling her to go on, to pick up the pieces, to 
     do something for other people's children. And so Stanford 
     University was from the Stanfords a living monument to other 
     people's children, born of the test of faith, the test that 
     is struggle. And I began to understand too the words of an 
     old Negro spiritual that had always been somewhat confusing--
     ``Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Glory Hallelujah''? 
     What does that mean? It means that out of struggle, faith is 
     honed.
       Now why is faith honed out of struggle? First of all, 
     because you are at that time forced to confront the 
     relationship between faith and doubt. When my mother died, I 
     didn't have any good answers. Did I on the one hand pray to 
     God for understanding and on the other hand doubt why this 
     had happened? Of course when Columbine happened, did you on 
     the one hand pray for understanding and doubt why had it 
     happened? But faith, and indeed the lessons of Christ teach 
     us that faith can be strengthened by doubt. It doesn't have 
     to be weakened by it.
       Some of my favorite stories in the Bible actually come from 
     the time when Christ is preparing to die. And when the 
     disciples--men who had walked with Him for the entire time of 
     His ministry, men who knew Him better than anyone else--found 
     themselves doubting and fearful of what was to come. He said, 
     ``I'll go to prepare a place for you.'' They said, ``Take us 
     with you because we don't actually know where you're going.'' 
     This isn't very reassuring. And of course the story of Thomas 
     which we had always been taught in a kind of pejorative sense 
     ``the doubting Thomas,'' but in fact what did Christ say? 
     ``Here, feel my side. Touch the wounds.'' He didn't say just 
     ``Leave.'' Doubt and faith have gone together from the 
     beginning of our religious experiences. And in times of 
     struggle, we are forced to work through our doubts in order 
     to re-energize our faith.
       Times of struggle also challenge us on the relationship 
     between faith and reason because most of us live most of our 
     lives in our heads. We try and understand why. And if you are 
     like me and you live in an intellectual community, if you 
     can't prove it, if you can't see it, then you can't possibly 
     believe it. And yet there are those times when reason just 
     will not do the job. I noticed the little quote by Abraham 
     Lincoln in the bulletin this morning. ``I've been driven many 
     times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had 
     nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me 
     seemed insufficient for the day.'' How many times has your 
     reason, your intellect failed you and you've had to fall back 
     on faith? In times of struggle, we learn to trust, we learn 
     to fall back on faith, we learn to fall back on that which 
     cannot be seen and cannot be understood, and it makes us 
     stronger.
       Finally, in times of struggle, perhaps more than at other 
     times, we are reminded also of the responsibilities of faith, 
     particularly if we've been through struggles ourselves and we 
     are called on to participate in, to be a part of someone 
     else's struggle. And it is that relationship between personal 
     faith and taking one's faith into the community to make it 
     better that I want to explore for a moment now--to take the 
     lessons and the power of faith outside of our own personal 
     experiences and into the community at large.
       Now in order to do that, you have to draw on other parts of 
     your faith. You have to draw on what has been honed and 
     toughened inside you when you yourself have struggled. But 
     you also have to draw on the power that is there for you to 
     first and foremost be optimistic. When I am very often asked 
     what has faith done for me that is most important, I say that 
     yes it's been there for me in tough times and struggle, but I 
     think it's also made me an optimistic person. It's made me a 
     person who believes that there can be a better tomorrow.
       If you don't believe that faith plays its role in making 
     you an optimistic person, think of the people who built this 
     country and the optimism that must have come from their 
     faith. Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to 
     come across the Continental Divide without roads? They must 
     have had faith that they were going to make it. They must 
     have had optimism about what was possible on the other side. 
     They must have gone together and indeed from that they built 
     a great country. Have you ever wondered about the faith and 
     optimism of my ancestors, slaves who were three-fifths of a 
     man who endured the most awful hardships of day-to-day life 
     and yet somehow looked optimistically to a future? They must 
     have done it out of the strength of their faith. They must 
     have done it out of the optimism that only faith can give.
       But imparting that optimism to people who are in need, 
     imparting the mysteries and the lessons of faith to people 
     who are in struggle is sometimes, oddly enough, easier than 
     imparting and using the lessons of faith in everyday life. 
     Sometimes we mobilize to use our faith when things are tough. 
     This city mobilized around Columbine. People are able to 
     bring themselves to love one another--Greeks and Turks after 
     the earthquake in Turkey, because you're mobilized in your 
     faith to help. But what about day to day in your interactions 
     with people in the community? Can you mobilize your faith in 
     the same way?
       I think sometimes the biggest impediment to mobilizing our 
     faith in our day to day interactions in trying to make our 
     communities better is really in our lack of humility about 
     what we as mere human beings can bring to the table. You know 
     sometimes people of faith are wonderful at dealing with 
     people in need. But in more normal times we're our own worst 
     enemy because sometimes the shouting, the desire to lecture, 
     overwhelms the desire to lecture, overwhelms the desire to 
     listen and to understand. I think sometimes that the greatest 
     impediment to people of faith in really making a difference 
     in their communities to people on a daily basis--not just 
     when we need to be mobilized--is that we sometimes have 
     trouble, as people of faith, meeting people where they are, 
     not where we would like them to be.
       And hereto, I draw on a lesson from Christ. Have you ever 
     noticed that when Christ was interacting with people, He 
     found a way to meet them where they were? With the rich young 
     leader, it was confrontational--to give up everything and to 
     give it to the poor was pretty confrontational. With Lazarus 
     and the sisters, it was dramatic--a miracle. With the woman 
     at the well, it was kind and understanding and quiet. How 
     many of us as people of faith have that entire repertoire at 
     our disposal? When we deal with people, do we ever stop 
     shouting so loud that they can hear through us the still, 
     small voice of calm, remembering afterall that we will not 
     personally work miracles in people's lives? That is the work 
     of God. But if we are to be a conduit, we have to be a 
     conduit that is willing to listen, a conduit that is willing 
     to help with humility, and a conduit that is willing to meet 
     people where they are.
       Those I think are the lessons of faith--to hone our 
     personal faith, to practice it every day, to pray for our 
     leaders and for those who must carry the heavy burdens, and 
     to try to use our faith and its lessons, not just when we 
     need to be mobilized, but in our everyday interactions. 
     Because only then can people of faith really make a 
     difference in communities at home and communities abroad.
       Thank you very much, and God bless you.

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