We know that Christ asks us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Mt. 5:44). We perceive those whom our culture deems to be enemies every night when we turn on the evening news. Some of these enemies are known within our borders, and others lurk in dark corners throughout the breadth of the world. Beyond the easy adversaries that we are expected to oppose, we see the results of our ‘enemies” work in the world all about us: displacement, poverty, violence, the destruction of our own and others’ dignity.
As a people of prayer, perhaps we add on a few petitions for our enemies to the end of our daily prayers: “Dear Lord, bless so-and-so; may they turn from their evil ways.” If we are more diligent, perhaps our list is more comprehensive and our healing desires for the enemy more elaborate, but the formula remains the same: we offer a petition-prayer for someone who has done something which we cannot condone and which may have adversely affected those things which we hold dear.
If undertaken faithfully, there is no doubt that this prayer-practice is powerfully transformative. I have heard stories of lives altered. But is this what Jesus meant by his commandment to love enemies and pray for those who persecute us? Or was something involving a little more personal engagement intended?
The word for ‘enemy’ in Jesus’ native Aramaic tongue by be translated as ‘one with whom one is out of step.’ On the Aramaic worldview, the whole cosmos was said to vibrate with a melody and in a rhythm that makes a music similar to what medieval philosophers called the music of the spheres. In this cosmology each person also vibrates with a particular tone and rhythm. When persons meet, the music of one is meant to complement the other, producing a richer sound than anyone might be able to generate on one’s own. But sometime the music of one person or a group of people does not vibrate in -step with another, and the melodies are dissonant. We find ourselves talking at cross-purposes; confusion and muddle arise. We are left with all manner of feelings: isolation, betrayal, abandonment, anger, humiliation, shame, and sometimes we are just plain bewildered — “What was that all about?”
Now the concept of enemy becomes much broader: it is the still the purveyor of corporate greed and the system of violence, but it can also become the spouse who never seems to understand our interests or needs; it can be the child that seems to reject us as a parent; or the friend who now seems to judge us. And this concept of enemy fans out beyond our immediate household: the enemy can become a society that no longer seems to speak to your values, the teller of a joke that holds no humour for you, or a network of social relationships that is all surface-civility and which can crumble in an instant.
“Oh no,” you say,”you’ve just made this more complicated. How am I ever going to pray for enemies now? This list is growing way too long. I’m not even sure who would be on the list! And what I be praying for anyhow!”
Let’s look to the communion of saints for some thoughts on praying for enemies. Let’s take as an example, John the Baptist. Now there was a man who had enemies (in both the evening-news and the Aramaic-sense): he preached a direct-baptism in an world where the might Roman occupier dictated most aspects of civil society, where the Temple-cult judged the status of an individual’s relationship with God, and where correct interpretation of the Law (or complete withdrawal from society altogether) had become the means of choice to spirituality oppose all the corruption. Now don’t you think John the Baptizer just might have looked around and said, in his own vernacular terms, “Lord, what planet am I on?” Don’t you think that he too might have been bewildered?
So it is interesting that we meet the (possibly) bewildered John in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey and proclaiming, “I am the voice crying out in the wilderness; prepare the way of the Lord.”
Jesus also went out to the wilderness to pray. He went out into the wilderness for forty days before he began his teaching-ministry. HJere was another person who had plenty of enemies! Daily he went off to a quiet place: he went up to the mountain-top, he went out into the middle of a sea, and he withdrew off by himself to spend time in communion with His Abba Father and His Mother, the Holy Spirit.
Was Jesus bewildered, too? What dissonance of music and rhythm did he suffer as he engaged the world of human pride, loss and sin? Were we all His ‘enemies’? Somehow – was it through this prayer of this wilderness? — he was able, by the close of his ministry, to call us all ‘friends’. This was the way of the Lord.
The way of the Lord is spoken and made in the wilderness. How so? Imagine yourself in that Palestinian desert. What might begin to unfold in you?
We have all been in wilderness-experiences – experiences that throw us out of ourselves and throw us (at least potentially) onto the way of the Lord. Falling in love, a sudden illness, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a VE-day, an invasion-day, the loss of a job, a family-secret out of the closet. At these times, our perceptions shift, our values and goals can be re-prioritized, and we may come to awarenesses that truly allow us to develop as a disciple and learner of Christ.
The way of the Lord is spoken and made in the wilderness. And it happens in this way.
First, we come to recognize God at the centre of our being: there is no one to cling to except God in the wilderness; here we learn to hunger and thirst for God. The spirituality of the wilderness is the spirituality of desire for God, and the foundation of this spirituality is prayer of the heart.
Second, this desire for God has neither obstacle nor distraction: gone are the social conventions and routines that sustained us in a functioning persona; gone are the things that kept us tied to what was known as reality.
Third, we are prompted to face our own inner demons, cares, expressions, past mistakes and future fears. This raw stuff of self permits us to see ourselves as the flawed (yet) beloved of God. We see our own Shadow. We can even see how our desire to escape the Shadow has played a role in the creation of the enemy. Everything we have not wanted to face has now become the garbage-dump upon which we expect some people in the world to live.
Lastly, in the wilderness, a deep prayer for enemies, based in compassion and love, becomes possible. Here, in the stillness and the silence, we begin to recognize that of which we are all capable, and we can say, along with the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne, “Nothing of man is foreign to me.”
Thus the way of the Lord comes in the wilderness, the way of the Great Leveler; He who raised the valleys and brings the mountains low. It becomes possible to speak of the enemy in ways that we would not, without the aid of the Holy Spirit, have been capable of perceiving or knowing. This shift is not pre-determined or foreknown: it is only in walking through the wilderness that the new awareness can be revealed.
But, according to the Aramaic understanding of enemy, we are already there. We do not need dramatic external event, for we are surrounded by ‘enemies’ who bewilder us. If we allow that bewilderment to breathe for one moment as it is, without pre-empting it through either a petitionary prayer of words or through self-defending anger; if we open our heart in a prayer of presence to and with God, then we might all enter the grace of the wilderness.
What happens in the wilderness? Prayer for enemies becomes more than adding names to one’s regular prayer of petition; instead it becomes an invitation and an instrument for God’s grace to transform self and world in, with and through the Holy Spirit. To face and love the enemy within.
 ReplyForward |
New Song 