by Neil Christie
I was seven years old when my family visited India for the first time. This was during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. I recall searching for shelter on the street of my parents’ home town, Surat, uncertain if the air raids were only practice drills or the real thing. So I prayed. Several months later, I was elated when my parents gave us the news that India had won the war. Then, when I was fifteen years old I had a new neighbor. He was a boy my age named Zharar Beg. Zharar was from Pakistan. Zharar was Muslim, not a Christian. We ate the same food, laughed at the same jokes, hung out with the same friends, and watched the same movies. But one day, Zharar told me what it was like to watch airplanes come over the border from India into Pakistan. He described how his family trembled with fear and anger as they heard bombs drop. And they prayed. In 1971 Zharar would have been my enemy. In 1979 we were friends. I wondered whose childhood prayers God heard during the war. Who are my neighbors? How do I pray for them?
My own experience pales in comparison to the tens of millions who suffer varying degrees of violence every day, ranging from intentional neglect at home to premeditated, protracted international aggression. In church, I have grown to expect emotionally distraught parishioners request prayers for their daughter, followed then by a more general request for prayers of protection for all U.S. combat troops serving in Iraq. Another parishioner mourns the death of his nephew who died as a humanitarian aid worker distributing food in Lebanon, and a third person offers up an angry prayer concerning the death of Israeli children killed by a suicide bomber. Across the aisle a parishioner chooses to pray quie tly because she fears that her prayer for the souls of the terrorists might distance her from the congregation. Who are my neighbors? How do I pray for them?
And how do we confront and decry all-too-routine hatred and violence with the sincerity and deep compassion of the Christian life? How do I live out the mishpat – justice, sadiqah – righteousness, and hesed – steadfast love that I long for in Christ? Do we really hear the Christ’s call for a more just community and offer our silent prayer in response? Do we truly empathize with another’s experience of violence and allow their experience to reside in our prayer life? Or do we stop short of this by praying for their protection and for our own? Do we bite our lips and reinforce with lit tle or no critique unspoken assumptions about the violated and violator, the inadequacy of international entities to achieve peace, or the cause and effect of neo-colonial occupation? And along the way do we acquit the war-making interests, strategies, and tactics that force us to choose life over life? In our prayers, do we raise up stories of people’s selfless efforts for peace and call our congregations to their own accountability for the violence?
Praying for pre-emptive peace means we name what makes for peace in the concrete:
- equitable distribution of food and clean water
- dignified work with a living wage
- tolerance of diverse religious and cultural expressions
- participatory civil institutions
- healthcare
- nutrition
- literacy
Individually and as church families, we generate and explore options, appreciate possible avenues of advocacy with persons and organizations of influence, and protest those that refuse to admit to violence. We organize ourselves by mutual obligations and seek collaborative alliances for violence prevention. We do this all in the name of Christ and as a spiritual discipline that holds us open to God and God’s work in our lives and in all the world When congregations try to image “peace”, they often lose themselves in describing abstractions. When we ask a congregation to imagine the words and phrases we associate with war, descriptions are concrete and specific. I also know that my own behavior gradually begins to resemble what I pray about and that my language makes a difference. Prayer in the context of protracted violence is an act of unusual faith. Churches that treat prayer as a disciplined process for promoting peaceful intervention will attempt to:
- remind all in the congregation of their purposeful identity in Christ,
- remember that our choice of language indicates which authority we ultimately recognize,
- reduce the distance between ourselves and those for whom we pray,
- temper any cries for war
- attend to any minimization, omission or indifference to acts of violence,
- imagine alternative ways to respond to violence and name and claim them,
- see the prayed-for “beloved community” as “actual” in the mind of Christ.
These suggestions are only a start. Our common liturgical acts can oppose a culture of violence and offer mindful and meaningful, culturally relevant connection with the mystery of God’s love.
Archbishop Despond Tutu was able to steer a post-apartheid nation away from national amnesia or a victor’s justice to a form of restorative justice through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The work of the Commission was a form of collective prayer and an incarnational form of collective prayer and ritual. Mothers of the Disappeared marched in Argentina and Women in Black march in Jerusalem. Christian Peacemaking Teams in Hebron and Baghdad and their humble and courageous physical acts serve as contemplative prayer in action. These too are ritual prayers of confession and cleansing for an alternative future.
While we may not be called to witness in places far away, we are called to witness and pray in the depths of our being for God’s shalom. Our very soul intention, voice and will—is formed in the liminal substance and space of prayer. Our spiritual identity, perception, and commitment to non-violent action are shaped by our prayer. We pray to love our enemies because we see that we are intrinsically related to them. Do we see ourselves in them? Who we see when we visualize our enemies, speaks volumes about who we see ourselves to be.
In the end and over time we become the quality of mercy, justice and love for which we pray.
Neil Christie is Assistant General Secretary at the General Board of Church and Society. For more information on resources, consultations and training go to
www.umc-gbcs.org/livingfaith.
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