Contemplating a long-ago prayer

This column may cost me some friends. If it does, the relationships weren't that strong anyway, but I'll miss them just the same.

Fifteen years ago, I had an elderly parishioner go to Cleveland Clinic for risky heart-valve surgery. He was in such poor shape, he couldn't walk more than 10 yards without stopping to rest. His surgeon told the family while the surgery was his best hope, there was a 50-50 chance he'd die on the operating table.

I saw him into surgery, and we waited. His wife and a friend who'd also made the trip to northern Ohio went to the cafeteria to see about lunch. Not being hungry, I took a walk back to the hotel the clinic operates for patients' families and friends. I wanted to pray for my parishioner. Since I had no wheels -- a taxi had brought me straight to the hospital -- I couldn't practically seek out a church.

Inside the hotel, wandering through a corridor, I noticed a room had been converted into a room for prayer. The door plaque read: "Prayer room." Perfect. I could pray and get back to the family without losing a lot of time.

Inside were wall hangings and a display book, all in a language utterly foreign to this columnist, a tongue that was probably Arabic. On the floor was a rectangular rug, a prayer mat. This room was a tiny mosque.

I'm a Christian of the United Methodist tradition. We're supposed to be open-minded. I stood there thinking, "May a Christian pray on a Muslim prayer mat?" The answer came back quickly: "God is everywhere. In my church, in my home, and, yes, on this mat, in a tiny mosque in Cleveland, Ohio." I got on the mat and lowered my head to the floor and prayed. When in Rome. (This is a point where some of my readers "unfriend" me on Facebook. I'll miss you.)

My parishioner survived the surgery and lived another 10 years before passing away from natural causes in Texas, where he and his wife had gone to live with family. There is no presupposition my prayer had anything to do with the outcome -- although I do agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson's observation that "more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." Since that critical day, I've wondered what might have happened to my own spiritual life if I'd been too afraid to get to my knees in that Muslim prayer room.

Fast forward to the present. France, like many countries in Western Europe, has seen a massive migration of Muslims. Five million are served by 2,500 mosques, according to the magazine "The Week." (July 31, 2015 edition). That's 2,000 people for every one mosque. The numbers don't work.

Most of these 2,500 mosques are just like what I walked into in Cleveland, prayer rooms tucked into commercial buildings. There's a ready solution that, according to a recent poll, is being opposed by two-thirds of France's citizens. The solution is to convert empty churches into mosques. It is estimated only 6 percent of the French attend Mass each Sunday, in a nation once a cradle of Catholicism, a state in which the papacy briefly was housed at a place called Avignon. Some abandoned church buildings, especially in rural areas, are falling into ruin. They might be repurposed into community centers, shops and nightclubs.

Why not mosques? This is a question for the French to decide, of course. It's their business. But I can tell you I was indeed grateful for that prayer room that day, even if the language there was not one I recognized nor a faith I espoused. God, I suspect, is bigger than any box in which we try to place Him (or Her).