Hands Joined in Prayer All Around the Globe : Today’s ‘World Peace Event’ Involves Millions of Positive-Thinking Participants Worldwide

Marnie Weeks contended that it is possible to say a separate prayer for every country in the world in less than an hour. And she planned to prove it early this morning as she gathered with about 800 others in the Long Beach Convention Center for a “World Peace Event.”

While most of us spent the hour between 4 and 5 this morning sleeping, Weeks was one of an estimated 150 million to 400 million activists worldwide who banded together to pray for world peace.

Event organizers based the estimate of the large response on a computer analysis of information from sources worldwide--religious leaders and private citizens who have organized large gatherings in their own nations.

Mass Meditation

They gathered in ashrams and town squares in India, on mountaintop ski resorts in Colorado, in churches and temples in San Diego and in the privacy of their own homes for a mass meditation billed by its organizers as the biggest participatory event in history.

The unusual time was no coincidence, for peace groups around the world planned to join together at that time to celebrate the end of the United Nations-designated International Year of Peace and to ring in what they hope will be the beginning of a new era of world harmony.

Four a.m. in California is noon Greenwich Mean Time, 3 p.m. in Moscow and 9 a.m. in Rio de Janeiro--the only hour in a day when all countries of the world share the same date.

“Everybody’s pretty aware of the condition of the world today,” said Weeks, executive director of the San Clemente-based Human Unity Institute, a nonprofit organization that planned to hold the Long Beach event in tandem with its annual conference. “It’s not exactly positive. . . . But there is a strong belief that peace is possible in the world, and this is an opportunity for people to participate.”

“In Russia, they’ll be ‘thinking’ about peace because they don’t pray or use that word,” said Barbara Douthitt, director of special projects for the Texas-based Quartus Foundation for Spiritual Research. “It has to be whatever is meaningful to the area.”

Candle-Lighting Ceremony

And today’s festivities will be capped off by a candle-lighting ceremony and concert at the Long Beach Convention Center, which will be linked live by satellite with a ceremony in Moscow, Weeks said. The concert should run from 3 to 7 p.m. and the candle-lighting is scheduled for 4 p.m.

Weeks is only one of the Southern California organizers for the worldwide event. In El Toro, between 100 and 200 peace activists were scheduled to meet at the Healix Center at 3:30 a.m. for a morning of prayer and a communal breakfast.

“The purpose is to hold thoughts of peace and harmony for just that hour,” said Happy Hunt, who organized the center’s celebration. “I like to look at it as an experiment to see what will happen when lots of people hold the thought of peace in their minds all at one time.”

The global meditation was in part the brainchild of John Randolph Price, founder of the Quartus Foundation. In his 1984 book “The Planetary Commission,” Price called on millions worldwide to pray together today.

“If these men and women would meditate simultaneously and release their energies into the earth’s magnetic field, the entire vibration of the planet would begin to change,” Price wrote.

Organizers and participants in today’s hour of meditation admit that discussion of the Earth’s vibrational status is a bit too esoteric for many audiences. But while the rhetoric was daunting, the purpose of today’s mass pray-in was simple.

“What this means simply is that, one, there is real power in prayer,” said John Babbs, a Denver attorney who helped rent his city’s 18,000-seat McNichols Arena for Colorado residents to gather and pray. “And, two, when enough of us want peace, we’ll get it.”

On Monday evening, it seemed that a substantial number had just that deep desire and planned to act on it--no matter how early they had to wake up to do it.

Carolyn and Bob McClellan, who live in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Ill., planned to spend their early-morning hour of prayer today at North Avenue Beach in downtown Chicago.

Despite a temperature certain to hover around 20 degrees, “We felt it would be wonderful to see the sun coming up over Lake Michigan,” Carolyn McClellan said in a telephone interview. “It’s pretty cool with the wind coming off the lake, but it’s the right place to be for me at least. . . . But I am going to bring a blanket.”

McClellan said Monday that she planned to think about personal peace and harmony as she shivered beside friends and family.

“I will be thinking about becoming peaceful myself, being at peace as much as I possibly can with my own being,” she said. “As I feel that light within myself, I will allow that light to go out to the rest of the world.”

Early Morning Mass Prayer

In Palo Alto, Calif., Carolyn Anderson, a color consultant, planned to cram into the 1,000-seat Stanford Memorial Church for 4 a.m. ceremonies and mass prayer. Anderson helped to organize the more than 40 such gatherings in the Bay Area in arenas ranging from private homes to Catholic churches and Buddhist temples.

She views the mega-event as a continuation of the movement started by the 1985 Live Aid concert to end world hunger, and last summer’s Hands Across America celebration to help this nation’s needy.

“I see this Dec. 31 event as part of a continuum,” Anderson said in a telephone interview. “Hands Across America and Live Aid also brought people together. This is another one. It just happens to be the largest one.

“Our purpose in doing all of this is we feel with so many people envisioning world peace, we can shift the collective consciousness on the planet from separation and competition to a deep desire for cooperation and unity,” she said.

On a more tangible level, that means cleaning up neighborhoods, being nice to the supermarket checker, loving family members and feeding the hungry, Weeks said, as she prepared for today’s event.

“The way we view peace is that it’s more than just an absence of war,” she said.