By Mark Kutolowski
You can listen to the audio version of this blog on our podcast page.
“God forbid that there be war. Please Lord, let there be peace!” Father John cried out his lament from the altar during the Prayers of the Faithful at Sunday Mass in our little country church in Norwich, Vermont. A few days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
“I’ve had a bit of a crisis of faith last week.” A guest shared at the beginning of a retreat at our homestead. “I prayed so hard for peace. Where was God, and why weren’t my prayers answered?”
As Lisa and I were facilitating at a retreat center, people spoke of being deeply disturbed by the suffering in Ukraine. One after another, retreatants struggled with the question: ‘How can this be happening in our age?’
Again and again, in spiritual direction, at church, with guests on retreat both at our homestead and afar, I hear the cries of people struggling with how to be present with violence unfolding in a faraway land. They are my cries, too. I wept when I saw photos of Ukrainian soldiers in their bunker, with an icon of Christ in the background. I knew that there would be young Russian soldiers looking at similar icons. These are young men and women from both countries with a personal relationship with the Prince of Peace, caught up in a war that is not of their own making, going out to shoot at each other in the streets. Why? Oh God, why?
Where is God when there is senseless violence and unjust suffering? If God is all powerful and all loving, why does evil flourish in our world? Why do innocent people have their lives destroyed by forces far beyond their control? In a time like this, these questions tear at the hearts of those who seek God. I can’t pretend to have clear answers to these haunting questions. But if we are to persevere in the way of faith, we must wrestle with them. Rather than letting them be a doorway to despair, we can choose to use them as fuel to feed the fire of our love for God and all people. How do we pray in a time of war? I want to share a few thoughts that have been helpful to keep my heart open in this time:
God is Not ‘Out There’: Often, we pray as if God is outside ourselves, and we are outside of God. We send our prayers ‘up and out,’ hoping that we will be heard, and that God will answer our prayer. Yet with a little theology, or with a direct encounter with God we know that this is not true. In God ‘we live, move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). We dwell in God, and God dwells within us and among us. Instead of petitioning a distant God, we are called to open our hearts and our whole being to the mystery of God within us, beyond us, and among us. From a place of resting in God, we can then call to mind and heart the suffering of others. When we hold both awareness of God and the awareness of others in their pain, a mysterious and healing exchange takes place. This, I believe, is the essence of Christian intercessory prayer – not to send off requests to a distant God, but to open our hearts to the mystery of God and the mystery of human suffering, holding both in unity and love.
The Suffering God: In Jesus’ own time, his people were eagerly awaiting a Messiah who would save their people through divine power, vanquishing the Romans and their oppressing armies. In our time, too, we tend to want God to take control and make things right in the world. When evil and injustice reign, we wonder: ‘Where is God?’ Yet a central revelation of God in Jesus Christ is that God enters into human suffering and injustice not through force, but through solidarity. God in human flesh chose to love and associate with the vulnerable and the rejected, and ultimately became one of them by dying as a tortured and rejected criminal. If we believe that the life of Jesus Christ is a revelation of the nature of God (Col 1:15), then God’s primary response to human suffering is presence and solidarity. God’s ordinary way of participation in human suffering is to transform our suffering from within through sacrificial love. I know this is not satisfying to our egos. I know it seems inadequate. It even appears to contradict the central message of the Exodus. But I can’t help seeing that this is at the heart of the Gospel story. If we are seeking God as God is, we must enter into the mystery of the suffering God.
Universal Blessing: To keep our hearts open, it’s utterly necessary to pray for all the people involved in a war – or any other evil situation. Jesus teaches ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust’ (Mt 5:44-45). If we only pray for the victims in a situation of violence, we harden our hearts to the humanity of the perpetrators of the violence. To stay fully human, we must offer love, compassion, and blessing to all – both victims and perpetrators. If we don’t, we make our love conditional. When our love is conditional, we distance ourselves from God who is unconditional love. It’s so easy to buy into the media scripting – to divide the world into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ and to admire the one group and despise the other group. This locks us into a dualistic, primitive way of understanding reality. By praying for Vladimir Putin and the people involved with the Russian army as well as the Ukrainians, we free ourselves from the egoic urge to demonize other human beings. We see them as they are, people made in God’s image and likeness who have become enslaved to sub-human behavior towards their fellow human beings. We pray for their healing and liberation along with praying for the healing and liberation of the Ukrainians. We don’t even need to understand the politics involved in a war or other human tragedy. Who is right and wrong doesn’t really matter for our prayer. We open our hearts, we love, and we bless – no exceptions. When we do this, we can fulfill Jesus’ teaching to ‘be without division, even as your heavenly Father is without division.’ (This is perhaps a better translation of Matthew 5:48, usually translated as ‘be perfect.’)
Accepting the Human Condition: I sense that there’s something in the mainstream, dominant narrative of Western culture that is offended by this war. It is offended by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. It’s this sense that we’re supposed to be making progress – that through human effort we’re gaining control and are in the process of building a better future, free of war and disease and suffering. I was heavily indoctrinated in this worldview in my schooling, especially as a white American boy coming of age around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The story I was immersed in was that we had just won the definitive battle between good and evil (the Cold War), and a future of continuous growth and expansion lay ahead.
This new war in Ukraine, just like the 9/11 attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic, is a stark reminder that we are not in control, and that human progress is not inevitable. Like every generation of humans before us, and like all people across the globe, we share in the human condition. We are subject to both immense joys and great evils in this life, both personally and collectively. Eastern Europeans, Americans – none of us are immune from the possibility of great personal or national tragedy. To live in Christ is to accept the human condition with its gifts and sufferings, and to open our hearts to Divine Love in every instant. Whether a day or a season brings us ease or hardship, suffering or relief, blessings or evil, we are invited to embrace our circumstances, and then cast them into the infinite ocean of Divine mercy. The paradox is that we cannot control our lives or escape human suffering, yet the more each of us accepts our necessary suffering, lets go of control, and trusts in God, the less we suffer.
As our journey through Lent continues, let us continue to pray. Let us pray in vulnerability. Let us pray in solidarity with Christ and with all who suffer, both perpetrators and victims of violence. Let us pray, knowing God is within us and among us. Let us pray blessings upon the Ukrainians and let us pray blessings upon the Russians. May our hearts remain open as we walk together in love.