The Politics of Praying in Wartime
By now, most of us would have had some exposure to the horror of war unfolding in Ukraine, and to the images of human suffering that this war has produced.
Although most of us are far from the theatre of war, only a particularly cold person could not be affected by the exposure of those images. I for one must confess that, although I have seen the images of many wars before splashed across my many devices over the years, this particular conflict has made me feel implicated in the conflict in some way. Part of the reason may be the friends that I made who live and work in Ukraine, part of it may be the involvement of Ukrainian Catholics in this war, and my (very loose) association with that Church during my time in Rome and Sydney. Even though I am not part of the Ukrainian Church, they are nonetheless my brothers and sisters in Christ, and that Church’s travails partially become my own as well, whether I want it to or not.
That being said, living in rural Australia, I cannot meaningfully do anything to alleviate the suffering in that part of the world, apart from contribute to Aid to the Church in Need’s Emergency Appeal, and I can also pray for the nation and the victims of this war.
In course of my prayers, I became conscious of the Christian faith’s capacity to be politicised to venomous effect, such that it becomes a weapon that legitimises the lethal application of force, whether to legitimise neo-imperialistic ambitions on the one hand, or to turn soldiers into martyrs on the other.
In a sense this overlap between politics and religion is unavoidable, as I learnt in my preparation for a lecture on Catholic Social Teaching. Speaking on the purpose of political community, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church spoke of the fundamentally spiritual foundation of any human society, including any political society. To quote the Compendium:
Human society must primarily be considered something pertaining to the spiritual. Through it, in the bright light of truth men should share their knowledge, be able to exercise their rights and fulfil their obligations, be inspired to seek spiritual values, mutually derive genuine pleasure from beauty of whatever order it be, always be readily disposed to pass on to others the best of their own cultural heritage and eagerly strive to make their own the spiritual achievements of others (386).
No wonder then that nations and spiritual investment seem to go hand in hand, so much so that nationhood can slip into the realm idolatry, and nations become spiritualised, changing from objects for our prayer to objects of our prayer.
In the course of praying for Ukraine, I also became aware of another angle, there is also an unavoidably political dimension to our prayer. The reason my mind went there comes out of some old research I published in a 2014 article entitled “Christian Prayer as Political Theory” in the journal Politics, Religion, Ideology. The foundation to that article was the realisation that prayer is not simply a mental exercise, but implicates our bodies as well. Every piece of sensory data, including the images of war that we see on our screens or that we hear in our news, is a piece of the world that leaves its imprint of our bodies. As we go into prayer:
both the person at prayer and what is brought to prayer is enfolded into God in Christ. The world one inhabits and as imprinted on that inhabitant’s body is made to abide with the Body of Christ as the act of prayer generates a communion with Christ.
As the article suggested, I do not merely bring the designs of the nations into my prayer; my prayer brings these designs into contact with another nation, that nation called the Body of Christ. To quote the article again:
prayer as an embodied practice thus has an inescapably political dimension because the mere fact that we are able to bring knowledge categories to prayer means we also bring in some understanding of belonging to a public. So, in a sense, every person at prayer each becomes a transistor that filters through and extends a political entity. Prayer is thereby not merely a vague stirrer of internal dispositions or an inspiration towards political action. Rather prayer’s implication of an inherently politicised body makes prayer a political action in and of itself.
This nation does not align with what we colloquially call “the national interest” since the Body of Christ cuts across nations. It cuts across time as well as space, and precisely because of this, it has priorities that also cuts across the priorities of the nations to the point that, as the Psalm 33 suggests, it “frustrates the designs of the nations” (Ps 33:10). On this point, Joel Lawrence’s reading of the war through the lens of the Book of Revelations is especially instructive here.
Thus, our prayer is not a helpless cry into the ether when one is at the end of his or her rope. Apart from other forms of material assistance, our prayer is also a concrete contribution by those who may not be proximate to the warzone, yet are bonded to those who are caught up in that warzone.
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