"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought?
Is it one prayer? No, it is two " one uttered, the other not." " from "The War Prayer," Mark Twain
It is a few days into the new year. In response to attacks by Hamas, Israel has launched air and ground assaults in Gaza. American soldiers still fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush still talks about victory in the Middle East, although no one listens anymore. And we await a new president who we hope is not too late to influence what seems to be a world determined to destroy itself.
I already have written a column about New Year's resolutions " how silly and self-serving they sometimes are, how they carry no penalties when we break them " something light for the beginning of the year. But when I watched the news and saw flames against the skies of the Holy Land, when I saw families desperate to bury their dead before sunset while screaming missiles fell around them, I knew that we needed only one New Year's resolution: To pause and think.
We need to think before we shout "Amen!" as our leaders " and leaders around the world " pray for victory. We need to think about what it is we're really praying for.
I wrote a column in March 2006 about the same topic: I talked then about the consequences of President Bush's narrow-minded insistence on victory in Iraq, and I shared a story by Mark Twain called "The War Prayer." Because nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed, maybe it's time to share that story again.
Twain tells about a congregation that prayed during wartime: "In every breast," he writes, "burned the holy fire of patriotism." The pastor beseeched God to crush their foe as they achieved nothing less than victory.
A messenger from God then entered the church. God would grant their prayer, he said, if they still desired it after the messenger explained its import. "For it is like many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware."
When men pray one prayer, the messenger said, God in His wisdom hears two: "One uttered, the other not."
Then he put into words the unspoken prayer: "O Lord, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.
"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 the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
"Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it of Him Who is the Source of Love."
The congregation fell silent. "If ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."
Do we still desire it? We can change what seems to be a passage to destruction. We can edit the history books that our grandchildren's children will read " if we pause and think. God hears two prayers in every prayer we utter. And our enemies are praying too.
- Marilee Swirczek lives and works in Carson City.