A Prayer to Us

It’s Christmas morning, and the Pope is praying for peace. I like Pope Francis (except for the fact that he lets the Catholic Church remain patriarchal). He has generally progressive and humane ideas about our responsibilities to one another in this life. But he’s wasting his time praying for peace.

Prayer has been a staple of the religious and, in emergencies, the non-religious for millennia. I assume every pope since the beginning of popes prayed for peace. We might ask ourselves why those prayers have not been answered.

For atheists, the answer is easy: no God.

For those who believe, from the fervent to the hopeful skeptic, the answer is more complicated.

Many say, He gave us free will, so He doesn’t intervene. Of course, if you believe that, you have just made the case for why prayer is a waste of time. He’s letting us do our thing, presumedly hoping we will learn from our sins and eventually evolve into more moral humans. (It’s always a He, right? This is Francis’s problem with women priests, I assume.)

If you believe He does intervene occasionally, you have to ask yourself when. Why does he permit so many children to starve to death worldwide? Or be butchered by their genocidal elders? Those poor babes don’t live long enough to learn any lessons. Really, if you look at life and world events, from wars to natural disasters, it’s hard to think God is involved in our day-to-day affairs.

He seems to have left it up to us.

Looked at that way, prayer is more of a complaint than anything else. “Help, we can’t fix this. Bail us out.”

But He’s not going to. He has left it up to us.

If that’s the case, I suggest we quit praying and start doing something about our troubles. 

Here are a few ideas:

1. Vote for politicians who seek peace. Resist the urge to revert to tribal defensiveness. Open your hearts to the other.

2. Give time or money to organizations that help those in need. Go global or go local. Your choice.

3. Spread the word. Post on Facebook your hopes for peace and goodwill, and what you are doing to advance them. Or Instagram. Or Twitter. Be a voice in the wilderness.

4. Reach out to those around you. Forgive old sins. Bandage old neglects. Stitch up the wounds of your friends and family.

Don’t give yourself to the Lord. Give yourself to your fellow man. I imagine that if She’s paying any attention to us at all, that’s what She wants of us. Surely She’s not concerned about crowd size and loyalty. We already have one of those in our lives right now, and we see how that’s going. That’s not the kind of God we want.

The Stranger

“There’s nothing more frightening than a man with a gun in his hand, and nothing more helpless than a man without one.”

   —the worst bad-guy in “Godless”

“Godless,” the name of a new tv series, describes the territorial American west where it is set and most of the men who drift and plunder there. Inevitably, in the way of these stories, we root for the least-bad bad-guy. Sure, he’s killed some men, but he teaches a boy to ride and be a good man and he defends a town against ravaging marauders.

It’s any Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. It’s the Magnificent Seven.

But something about the way “Godless” is told brought home to me in a way none of those epic westerns ever has how close we are still to those fearful times. When a stranger comes to the door in “Godless,” he or she is greeted with a gun; and if he doesn’t account for himself quickly enough, he is shot. Not just by the hard guys, but by most anybody. Even Michelle Dockery, for Pete’s sake—Downton Abby’s Lady Mary after a long and harrowing journey west.

In the west of “Godless,” it didn’t pay to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt.

The stranger killed a whole town, just because they harbored someone he had a grudge against. (A nod to the way the Nazis handled towns harboring Jews, now that I think of it.)

The stranger came to your campfire and took your woman for the night. In the morning, he ridiculed you for not laying down your life for her.

The stranger hid in the dark bar and lit the lamp so the sheriff got one last look at who was about to kill him.

It’s tempting to say that Donald Trump is the murderous stranger who has taken us back to the land of “Godless,” but all he did was lead us out of town and set us down around a campfire with darkness all around and start making noises like someone was coming for us. It didn’t take much to stimulate our primitive fears, the conditioned reflex that has in dark times permitted us to survive.

Are these dark times? Do we have that much to fear? Is the stranger coming for us?

That depends. Not on Trump, but on us. Will we fall for his demagogic rants that we are in mortal danger from the other? Will we allow ourselves to be whipped into a murderous frenzy by his taunts and humiliations? 

Or will we realize that the stranger is not someone with a different skin color or a different religion, or even someone who undoubtedly wishes us ill but who from a practical standpoint is unlikely to be able to harm us? Will we take a step out of the darkness and see that, each to the other, we are ourselves the stranger? That, to paraphrase FDR, we have nothing to fear but ourselves.