Prayer in a Time of War

I do not understand war. Even in the present time, for all my deeply felt moral and religious commitments touching on today’s conflicts, the reality of war itself seems to engulf my certainties. I am often at a loss for words and prayers.

In 2018, I attended a church service in a small provincial French town outside Chartres. We were remembering the day when World War II ended. The speaker was an old man from the area who recalled what the last days of the war were like for him as a young boy. The Americans, going after German troops, were bombing Chartres and its surroundings. They very nearly destroyed the famous cathedral, where Nazi snipers were supposedly holed up—warned off only at the last moment by a courageous American soldier on the ground, Welborn Griffith, who personally determined that the spire was empty. Griffith was killed shortly thereafter. Our speaker remembered running through his backyard, bombs falling, huddling in a gardener’s shed all night, night after night, shivering, wondering where his parents were.

After the service, my wife and I greeted him. “You are Americans!” he said, beaming, then weeping and hugging us. “Oh! When the American soldiers walked into the town! I could let go of my fear.” I was a bit confused: Weren’t we the ones bombing his home? He waved away the question with his wrinkled hand. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s not think about that.” The calculus here was clearly complex. What he remembered was the peace that had taken hold after all the explosions, and his emergence from the shed. He tied it to the Americans striding through the streets of his village. He was a boy then; now he was in his nineties and his voice quavered with his tears. As I said, I do not understand war.

And I have never been in war, thank God, though I have walked amid its ruins. “Never again,” says the inscription on a monument at an incinerated gas station in the mountains of Burundi where scores of students were burnt alive during the country’s 1972 civil war. It is a monument I have walked by and gazed at several times over the years. And of course it did happen again, not only there, but over and over elsewhere. Yet it is only a monument that speaks. People who have been in the midst of war prefer to say little. The silence of combatants and victims is proverbial. We build monuments to proclaim; we hire journalists to do the talking.

My father never spoke of the bodies in the South Pacific he picked his way through in the mid-1940s. This kind of reticence was true for the Second World War as much as any war—a war that, at the time and still, few hesitated to evaluate as “just,” or at least “necessary.” That silence predominated because, however just, the bodies and the fear, the sorrow and the repulsion, are themselves rarely able to be transfigured by a cause. They simply remain what they are. However just the cause that leads to war, as in the 1940s, the stories, poems, novels, and movies that later speak about the carnage end up sounding ambiguous, dark, and troubling. Karl Shapiro’s famous line in his “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” captures the morally ambivalent quiet that greets the ponderer of war: “However others calculate the cost, / To us the final aggregate is one, / One with a name.” The dead or the suffering are not translatable into causes.

Among the most celebrated commentators on the nature of war is the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Whether or not he ever actually said “war is hell,” this servant of the Union conveyed it. In his letter to the mayor and councilmen of Atlanta (dated September 12, 1864), explaining the terrors of his campaign and occupation, he wrote: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable.” Sherman made clear that the travails of war are the cost of upholding, as he saw it, the laws, the Constitution, and the well-being of “millions” of other people in the United States.

There are paralleling and shuddering logics at work here: This war is just; this war is hell; hell is just; this war is necessary; hell is inescapable. Though Sherman was baptized a Catholic, raised his children Catholic, and was buried by his Jesuit son, his faith was hardly central to his personal life, let alone his political or moral vision, such as it was. He was a utilitarian of power and order. His views on race would today rightly be considered repugnant. Still, he seems to have imbibed a deeply Christian sense of things when it came to war. War is judgment.

But judgment on whom? On everyone involved. War is a set of judgments not measured by an abstract moral equivalency but meted out to each side or group or individual—each body, each name—for their own reasons. Human beings are caught up in the world of our own making, rather than God’s; and our making shapes a myriad of warped terrains. Think of the disorienting vision of the first two chapters of Amos, where the nations (Moab, Edom, Damascus) are judged for their cruel treatment of Israel (among others), even as Israel’s suffering is described as a punishment for her own crimes. We all deserve what we get—and we are condemned for giving each other what we deserve. We cannot do away with the concept of a “just war.” But we cannot escape the judgments we will bear even with its criteria properly accounted for.

I am not a pacifist in any strategic sense. Peace is not an instrument (as if peace is ever “waged”). Non-resistance and martyrdom have rarely if ever altered the track of human armies. Peace, instead, simply “appears,” like the rain—sometimes out of negotiation, with all its ponderings, shifting interests, and unpredicted changes of mind; or out of the defeat and dismantling of enemies; or, as much as anything, out of the exhaustion and disappearance of fighters and their families through death, disaster, disease, famine, or migration. Peace is a grace, not an achievement, even as we must strive to preserve and secure it.

Christians pray for peace. Dare we also pray for the success of this or that army? Perhaps, and in the face of peace’s long and sorrowful tarrying. Scripture is filled with such yearnings, none of which are condemned. But such prayers ought also, if they are said at all, be willing to trail off into the quiet of sorrow and repentance. For who will pray for a victory, rightly and justly, without also being willing to go into the place where men are silent, thoughts are tangled, and the gates of memory are barred to others? And, if willing, to ask for forgiveness? Thus do I fumble at the glibness of my petitions.

The relationship of Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk was complicated and never consistent. Nonetheless, it seems that they achieved a mutual trust of some sort, even a genuine respect. They had each, in their own way, entered the silent place and seen what lay inside. The end of South Africa’s apartheid regime was marked by blood, sacrifice, recriminations, and resentments, all of which are ongoing in new and not always attenuated forms. All of this is marked by prayers and invocations. By curses and despairs. And also, at critical moments, by repentance and forgiveness. This often-wild medley is not a recipe for peace; it only indicates the gathered ingredients that, however measured, seem always to make up peace’s taste. A taste that old age will remember perhaps differently than the ardent young but is savored all the same.

Let us remember these ingredients of peace, and hope for their divine confection—a better prayer than most of us tend to offer these days. General Sherman himself seemed to have recognized that peace is in God’s hands. At stages of his often vicious Georgia campaign, his opponent was the Confederate general Joseph Johnston. After the war, the two became friends, and they often shared dinner. They had seen and felt too much to harbor enmity. As an old man, Johnston traveled up to New York City to be a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral. Standing in the rain, he insisted on keeping his head uncovered to fully honor Sherman. He caught a cold and died of pneumonia shortly thereafter.

Neither Johnston nor Sherman respected war. They did, however, come to respect people who had made the deep journey into war, and in its depths recognized the realities of taintedness and grace. That recognition, and eventual respect, is at least something we can pray for without moral confusion.

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

Image by Picryl, licensed via Creative Commons. Filter added, image cropped.