Praying As Solidarity With The Suffering

We are made for community, small communities like our family and friends, larger communities like our neighborhoods and work environments, and macro communities like our nation and even the global world. As our communities have gotten larger, our capacity for holding space for those communities may not have grown at the same rate. So when we’re faced with a global crisis like the war in Ukraine right now, how can we hold space - real, authentic space - for a community in crisis so far away?

Transcript

Welcome to a prayer practice.

I'm Kelly Weber and I'm a spiritual director.

We are made for community.

Small communities like our family and friends,

Larger communities like our neighborhoods and work environments,

And macro communities like our nation and even the global world.

As our communities have gotten larger,

Our capacity for holding space for those communities may not have grown at the same rate.

Just look at our social media news feeds to see how authentically we engage with the larger communities.

Not very well.

And the level of stress we feel because of the influx of news of national and global events is certainly cause for overwhelm.

And in that overwhelm,

We often avoid,

We numb,

Or we instigate conflict,

Fight,

Flight,

Or flee.

So when we're faced with a global crisis like the war in Ukraine right now,

How can we hold space,

Real,

Authentic space,

For a community in crisis so far away?

Often we hear that thoughts and prayers aren't helpful because we don't feel like we're really making a difference.

But here's the thing.

What hubris do we have to think that we can or even should feel like we can make a difference?

Some things are too big.

In the face of war,

Sometimes we are helpless.

And the best we can do is stand in the solidarity of suffering through prayer.

We can be present to it.

We can be a witness and not turn away.

This has been difficult to write.

My own feelings of helplessness and my impulse to avoid looking at the suffering stymies me.

I've started and stopped and erased and rewritten 100 times this week.

But then I read Pastor Tish Harrison Warren's essay in The New York Times titled,

How Readers Around the World Are Praying for Ukraine.

She culled a selection of prayers sent in from readers,

One of which is from a Ukrainian woman whose husband is a pastor and whose family is still in occupied territory.

Listen to her prayer.

Stay present to it as she shows us what a radical act it is to pray.

Father God,

May the attacker's fingers freeze.

May they drop things.

May they not see clearly.

May their equipment malfunction.

May they experience overwhelming hopelessness,

Enormous fatigue,

And a complete loss of any desire to fight.

May their communication be broken.

May there be confusion.

Lead them to surrender.

Stretch the kilometers before them into endless kilometers of non-advancement.

Remove their leadership and replace them with people who make decisions that reflect a fear of you.

Oh,

God,

Infuse defenders with incredible surges of renewed alertness,

Strength,

Hope,

Courage.

Inspire those who want to help.

Show them specific,

Effective ideas.

Move them swiftly and safely.

The worst is yet to come,

Lord,

If you do not stop it.

But please,

No peace where there is no peace.

We ask for peace united with righteousness and truth.

God of all comfort,

Be physically present with all the mothers,

Fathers,

Grandparents,

And children who are hiding,

Hearing,

Smelling,

Enduring.

Warm them.

Fill them with food.

Give them water,

Toilets,

Communication with their loved ones,

The gospel,

Hope in you.

We repent of making idols of political leaders and news outlets.

Forgive us for wanting them to be our gods and saviors.

Forgive us for being unreasonable,

For not wanting to admit both the good and bad in all of our leaders.

It is this spirit that leads us to dictators because we abandon responsibility and reason.

We confess the seeds of war that live in our own hearts.

We humble our hearts,

Our bodies.

We ask you for mercy.

Thank you that you love mercy and have all power To stay present doesn't mean to be a glutton for 24-hour news.

That's a numbing of a different kind.

Rather,

Try this as a practice.

Print out one of the many pictures of the devastation in Ukraine.

Take it outside,

Away from your devices and the television.

Sit with it.

See it.

Reflect on the people in the picture.

Be present with their suffering.

Be a witness and do not look away.

Ask God to make you aware when you react to other suffering by numbing out and to give you the resilience and the space to be a witness.

If you commit to this practice of witnessing,

You will be so grateful when an opportunity arises for you to take action.

I have a practice of reading poetry through Lent.

And the other day,

I read the poem To a Siberian Woodsman by Wendell Berry.

He wrote the poem in 1968 as a response to the Cold War and the enmity it created.

But specifically,

He wrote it after he saw some pictures of a Siberian woodsman in a magazine.

Here,

Being present to the humanity of one's enemy is also a radical act.

To know that over 7,

000 Russian soldiers have died in this war,

Soldiers that were fed propaganda and lies.

In Harrison Warren's essay,

Another reader writes,

My Ukrainian brothers and sisters understand that the Russian soldiers are not their true enemy.

Their desire isn't that they suffer or die,

But that they return home and they can all live in peace.

Though fighting and even killing may be necessary,

We remember our common humanity and shared need for peace.

Our common humanity,

Our common unity,

Our community.

To a Siberian Woodsman after looking at some pictures in a magazine.

You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

Listening to your daughter play the accordion.

You smile with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands,

Resting after a day of long labor in the forest.

The cry of the saw in your head and the vision of coming home to rest.

Your daughter's face is clear in the joy of hearing her own music.

Her fingers live on the keys like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

Tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

Over you,

As your hands work,

Is the dream of still pools.

Over you is the dream of your silence while the east brightens,

Birds waking close by you in the trees.

I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

Your son in your tracks.

You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest whose ways,

Strange to me,

Are well known to you as the sound of your own voice or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to speak.

And soon,

The voice of the stream rises ahead of you and you take the path beside it.

I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over you as you come to the pool where you will fish and of the mist drifting over the water and of the cast fly resting in light on the face of the pool.

And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself in the world.

I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy and slow along the feet of the trees.

I hear the voices of the wren and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the windows and over the roof.

In my house,

My daughter learns the womanhood of her mother.

My son is at play pretending to be the man he believes I am.

I am the outbreathing of this ground.

My words are its words as the wren song is its song.

Who has invented our enmity?

Who has prescribed us hatred of each other?

Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world?

Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children?

Who has appointed such anger to you?

Who has set loose the thought that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and rivers and the silence of the birds?

Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange to you and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you or that I could improve myself by destroying you?

Who has imagined that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen these pictures of your face?

Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you or laugh with you or visit in your house and go to work with you in the forest?

And now,

One of the ideas of my place will be that you would gladly talk and visit and work with me.

I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

As they are native,

I am native.

And I hold to this place as carefully as they hold to it.

I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the sycamore or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the walnut,

Nor has the elm bowed before any monuments or sworn the oath of allegiance.

They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

In the thought of you,

I imagine myself free of the weapons and the official hates that I have borne on my back like a hump.

And in the thought of myself,

I imagine you free of weapons and official hates so that if we should meet,

We would not go by each other looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their burdens,

But would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

There is no government so worthy as your son,

Who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.

There is no national glory so comely as your daughter,

Whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

There is no national glory so comely as my daughter,

Who dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.

There is no government so worthy as my son,

Who laughs as he comes up the path from the river in the evening for joy.

Amen.

Thanks for praying with me today.

May we stand in humble presence to the suffering of our neighbors.

May we be forgiven the atrocities of our own nation.

May we be shown concrete ways to help.

And may we commit ourselves to the practice of common unity.

Be well,

Friends.

I'll see you next week as we continue our practice.

Reviews

Wow!!! Powerful! Thank you for sharing this humbling experience. 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Wow ! Thank you ! I forgot how magnificant a poem can be ! Just what I needed this Monday in Holy Week !

Thank you. I've been struggling with this issue. Your thoughtfulness words, the tone of compassion, the prayerful insight has given me some peace. And, I too can pass that on.
Namaste.

Powerful🙏🏻
May we follow the greatest commands~love God, and our neighbors as ourselves🛐