What am I praying for when I pray for peace? It can never be a simple victory of one side over the other without resorting to violence. People don’t start a war because they are fed up with peace, but because they want to settle a grievance or gain power over others. The rightness or wrongness of their claim doesn’t take away the fact that it is motivating them to that violence. To ignore this fact is to desire, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace’ (Jeremiah 6:14)
When I pray for peace am I simply taking sides? I pray for the war between Russia and the Ukraine to end because I want Russia to admit its errors, withdraw from territory that is not theirs, and help rebuild the country they have devastated. But even if this increasingly unlikely outcome were to happen, what will happen to the ambitions and grievances of Putin and his allies? However, justified the Ukrainian case is, not everyone agrees with it, and peace is still far away.
If my prayers for an immediate cease fire in Palestine, the Sudan, Russia were granted, what would happen to the fears and anxieties of the perpetrators of this terrible violence? I am not trying to say that ‘both sides have an equal case’ in their dispute, or that war is always, ’six of one and have a dozen of the other’, but that praying for peace is always more complicated that simply taking sides in a situation and squashing the other non-violently. Wanting an end to violence is never enough, we need to engage is what Martin Luther King called, ‘a redemptive, creative, good will’. Resolving conflict by understanding where violence has come from.
The sense of outrage that I feel when I hear such a demand! To listen to the vile perpetrators of evil in the Sudan, Russia, Israel. I won’t, I can’t listen! But it is entering into the outrage, refusing to be triggered into violence, that is the heart of non-violence. Risking the ‘moral peril of encouraging the bad guys by paying attention to them when the whole of my being screams ‘cancel them’, ‘ignore them’, ‘punish them!’
In my anxieties and confusion in such prayers, I can only call upon the Quaker prayer, to ‘Hold them in the Light’! The light of a God who doesn’t take sides but simply comes into the mess and holds us in the light.
