I’m sure I’m like so many others, wondering just what is going on in the world. Apart from those who imagine D J Trump is their messiah, what can a person of faith (of any faith) do or say about this.
Even more challenging, how might we pray in this time. For what might we pray?
I do not think of or practice the sort of prayers that have been described as a ‘shopping list’. If anything, that drives me away from most ideas of ‘prayer’, towards contemplation as a silent practice.
But today I am challenged by a reading from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. This year will mark 80 years since his death in a Nazi prison. In January 1944 he wrote to his very close friend Eberhard Bethge, describing how he and the other prisoners were coping with nightly bombing raids. He mentioned in this letter that two nights before a fellow prisoner with whom he shared intelligent conversation and genuine friendship had been killed.
Bonhoeffer had begun his letter by confessing that he was constantly thinking about the privations and suffering of his friends and family rather than really praying for them.
I found myself wondering what he meant by that: He would like to discuss with Bethge what prayer means here: ’prayer in a time of need’. Typically, Bonhoeffer immediately turned to the biblical Psalms, quoting Psalm 50: ‘Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you …’ He remarks that the ‘entire history of the children of Israel consists of such cries for help.’ [I have to make a mental effort to read this sentence independent of my profound concerns with the modern state bearing that name.]
Bonhoeffer then, so honestly, describes himself during the bombing raids: lyinng on the floor, with other prisoners, expecting death like his friend … Another prisoner cried out ‘O God, O God!’, while others are making vows or other deeply felt responses to this crisis. Bonhoeffer himself wonders whether he should have something to say, by way of encouragement or comfort. But he does not. He thinks of how much he loves his family and friends, but mostly he simply lies there in endurance: looking at the clock, wondering how long this might last.
He also says that he will not, resolutely will not, use an occasion such as this for what he calls ‘religious blackmail’.
This is all profoundly moving. At once we see the immediate terror of the bombing, that so many people in the world today know. We see too that such times make us acutely aware of who we are and to whom we belong, those we love and who love us. But then, too, we see Bonhoeffer’s great honesty about the practice of prayer. He will not perform prayers, neither to manipulate others in their vulnerability, nor to seek some easy ‘rescue’ from God.
Instead, he reflects on what the suffering of people means for God. What he senses is God’s anger and judgement. The bombing is a symbol of God’s judgement upon human regimes of power, exploitation, oppression, and death. It is not that God is on one side against the other, in this war. The kind of vows or incantations that ask for victory or survival, as reward for ‘doing the right thing’, none of this is real prayer in this situation. His use of the word judgement might invite us to think that God is on one side, against his own nation, and indeed Bonhoeffer elsewhere struggled with the idea of praying for the defeat of his own people. But I think his meaning is more profound still.
Rather, Bonhoeffer refers to God’s ‘hand outstretched’—in anger. But this divine anger is not partial, nor a comfort to Bonhoeffer that he is in the right. He thinks instead of his family and writes that is someone must die, better he than them.
I have been reflecting on this hand outstretched. It is an invitation to be there together. I am reminded of Martin Luther King’s words, when once he referred to a deeply comforting sense, amidst great turmoil and struggle, of a sense, at the heart of things, of cosmic companionship.
‘Prayer in a time of trouble’ very likely has no words at all. I sense this now. It is impossible to know what to ‘pray for’, though one may pray for the many victims of war, and those desperate nations from whom aid is being cut off, to help fund those same wars.
But more than that, I think mostly this is a time for silent feeling. Feelng-with those suffering, disappointed, alienated, hungry, homeless, bereaved of family and community, dying: and here I am sure that this means feeling with God, the hand outstretched.
We are not alone in the universe. The turmoil and distress of this time is not unique. Many others have known such times before us. In times of suffering we find who we are and what is real. This is a time for outstretched hands, in silence perhaps, but in affirmation of the community of life, in spite of all, a community of all creation, all peoples, and all hopes. This silent hand outstretched is my prayer.
There is much that will need to be done, in dealing with this appalling situation in the world. But as we contemplate that, we do well to begin with this silent feeling-with.