"The War Prayer"

Caution: This post will make you extremely uncomfortable and will probably make you dislike me.

Amidst the Philippine-American War, Mark Twain wrote a short story entitled, The War Prayer. This brief work details the account of a patriotic church service focused on praying for the enlisted men headed off to war. During the service, the pastor of the church leads the congregation in a long prayer, asking for God’s presence with the American soldiers as they head into battle, to “aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work…shield them in the day of battle…make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.”

As the pastor prays, a frail, old man appears on the stage near the pulpit. As the pastor finishes his prayer, the old man touches him on the shoulder and speaks: “I come…bearing a message from Almighty God!” This messenger tells the congregation that this prayer has been heard, so long as they understood the “full import” it carries. It turns out, the prayer is not one but two, “one uttered, the other not.” But God has heard both. For, “When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for the many unmentioned results which follow victory—must follow it.” The messenger proceeds to tell them the unuttered part of the prayer:

“O Lord our God…Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead…
Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;
Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;
Help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended…
For our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord,
Blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage…water their way with tears…
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love
And who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset…”

The congregation’s response to the real truth of the prayer they had offered to heaven? “ It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.” The End.

As I think of the $670 billion spent in Iraq for our military endeavor, the 4 million Iraqis displaced from their homes, the 1.3+ million Iraqis who have died since our invasion of their country, the pictures I have seen of orphaned and wounded Iraqi children, the ravaged Iraqi countryside, and the many years it will take for that country to be stabilized, I must ask, what kind of prayer did we pray? What are the implicit prayers we have prayed as a nation as we send our sons (and daughters) to Iraq? While the “unuttered” prayer in the story speaks only to the ravaging effects war has on the country being attacked, we need only think of the news headlines from this week alone to think of another implicit prayer at work as we pray for “victory”:

O God, may we damn our country before the eyes of the world.
May we shame ourselves by horrendous acts of torture upon the “enemy.”
May our leaders debate in anguish over the value of photographs depicting our soldiers’ actions.
May our men open fire upon their own platoon and send their fellow soldiers home in a coffin.
May Iraqi women be gang-raped and their families murdered.
May we hide from the truth, refusing to believe what “America” has become.

On a completely different (though not wholly dissimilar note), the idea that our prayers often have an unuttered aspect to them makes me wonder about the underside of all our prayers, wonder how often all kinds of prayers of blessing for ourselves turn out to be a curse upon someone else. One man thanks God for a sunny day at the beach; a farmer down the road curses God for allowing his crops to die. One man prays their team will win; another prays in support of the opponent [does God care?]. One man thanks God for the 4-course meal before him; a child in Haiti wonders if God is going to do anything about the world food crisis. One man thanks God he has a new job because the new factory did indeed open; another man curses God for being laid off as the company relocates. How do we reconcile this fact? How does God deal with all of this (Which reminds me of the move Bruce Almighty when Bruce makes a computer program to keep track of everyone’s prayers and simply replies “Yes” to all of them.)? Your thoughts?