Prayer in the Daily Mail

Today's Daily Mail ran with a story about how a hospital nurse who asked an elderly hospital patient if she wanted her to pray for her has been suspended from work and faces the sack. Read more here.

There's a lesson to be learned from this story, although it's certainly not the lesson which the Daily Mail journalists were trying to sell. What they have to say we've heard a thousand times before. Woe is Britain; cherished traditions are falling away; Christianity is persecuted; political correctness runs wild. No, these perennial Daily Mail subjects are not the ones I want to talk about here. What's more interesting is to look at what they're actually trying to defend - whether they know it or not - in this specific instance.

To judge from the information contained in the article, the nurse in question had "asked" her patient if she wanted her to pray for her. Now that's important. I very much doubt any of the health officials the article mentions would have had a problem if the nurse had tottered into a quiet corner to say a few words of prayer on her behalf without asking. Then there's the underlying implication which attaches to the fact that she asked if she would like to be prayed for. Was permission needed? If not, what was the point in asking? The answer to this question takes in a number of issues and relates above all to the form of Christianity which the nurse was giving expression to.

Of course, the whole exchange has all the hallmarks of Biblicist evangelicalism (the article stiplulates that the nurse is a worshipper in just such a tradition, a 'Baptist' one). In this tradition, people can and should be put on the spot and asked difficult questions; not only that, but people are asked if there's anything they should or might like to have prayed for on their behalf. In itself, this way of doing things no doubt irritates some people (though not the woman concerned in this instance) but is not really particularly harmful.

But what if someone is lying on their deathbed and you are from a tradition which believes that people who don't 'follow Christ' (in the way you see fit) will be damned. Then the 'prayer' question can represent a whole different agenda. The underlying implication is 'I'll let you know that I'd like to pray for you right now, because if you don't submit to Christ pretty soon, you'll be stewing with Satan before too long: prayer, therefore, is the least I can do'. If that was anything like the impression left by the nurse on the woman she was dealing with, or with anyone else for that matter, it would be no surprise whatsoever if complaints were made.

A final point is worth mentioning here and it relates to the ethics, not to mention the eticet, of prayer. Prayer can and should happen whateverthe people being prayed for think about it. They don't have to know about it. To pray for someone, I don't, and should never, need a permission slip. In this respect, prayer is like forgiveness. It should be done whether my adversary forgives ME or not. Or like love. I must love my enemies whether they love me or not.

The person who asks someone permission to pray for them is not listening hard enough either to God or to their neighbour. 'Would you like me to pray for you?' is not a question any Christian should ever have to ask. They should be praying for the person concerned anyway. Underlying their prayers should be the belief that deep down, in the heart of hearts of the person they are praying for - however far from God they might seem, that person WANTS to be prayed for. Now that's far more non-PC. Questions of this sort, of course, are - alas - not the Daily Mail's strong suit.

The Church of Violence

As I was sitting today in the local church in London, talking with a friend, I heard a shout and a bang from outside the church door, where a man and a woman had been sitting, arguing. Clearly, someone had been hit. The woman - she was about 40 - rushed in to the church, crying. No one followed. My friend and I wondered what to do. We walked over and she said she had been hit and that she was afraid. I asked if she wanted help: did she want me to check if he had gone, or if he was still outside. Did he have a weapon? No, apparently. I went out to look, and as I did, the man came in. The couple began arguing with one another. It was a desperate, pitiful scene. She accused him of hitting her and of being prone to violence. He was accusing her of abusing his children. She was saying she didnt want to be with him any more. He was saying that she had to stay with him. The conversation was heated.

With the threat of more violence in mind, my friend called the police. It seemed the right thing to do. I went over to the couple and offered them two chairs at the back of the church to sit down in. This was partly a strategy to stop him from getting her against the wall, and talking right into her face. It half-worked. Soon enough, the police arrived. They asked us what had happened and we told them. If we hadn't seen the violence, nothing could be done, we were told. We hadn't seen it, but we'd heard it. But that wasn't enough.

From what I could tell, the police did an admirable job of calming things down. They parted the man and the woman from one another, and sent each went away from the church in separate directions after about 10 minutes of discussion. What more could the police do? The officer who talked to us impressed me. He was courteous and understanding and somewhere in conversation he slipped in the sage remark that 'we all have our domestic issues'. True enough. But it's still sad that physical violence so easily appeals to us as a useful means of communication: it helps us get our stubborn point across, when all else fails. And I can't think that it really does the job we want it to. Not really.

Of course, 'violence' - loosely conceived - is a fact of all human relationships. We do violence to each other's wills and inclinations when we come into contact with one another and attempt to do anything other than gratify. We strive to bend and shape others around our own agendas and presuppositions. Forms of 'violence' are enacted on humans around us in the world, all of the time, with our complicity. Some are pernicious; some are not. Most of us don't stick out our own necks out to stop what is pernicious. We are inclined not to. Such neglect of the needs of others is perhaps the grossest, and most tragic, example of what might be called 'indirect' violence. Everyone is complicit in it - some more than others.

Reflecting on some of these things a little later, I reminded myself that the Christian church was an appropriate setting for the events I witnessed: acts of human violence are never out of place in churches. Violence in the church has a strange and perhaps awkward double aspect. On the one hand, it has tended to be condemned - although perhaps not to the extent and frequency that we would like. Christians campaign for peace, mercy, love and forgiveness. Can these things truly be pursued through the use of violence, in any sense of the word? (Contextual factors have tended to decide the matter). On the other hand, it is well remembered that acts of violence give life - they are truly vital - both to the church and its congregations. The taking of the apple; the crucifixion, spearing and abandonment of Jesus; the acts of the martyrs. And, according to some theologies, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. We can look out more broadly too: what kind of beauty, what kind of joy, what kind of pleasure would there be without violence? Theologies of the Cross, however morbid and offensive some of them are, also make this point clear.

The most fundamental truth about Christian conceptions of violence, of course, is its recognition of the bare necessity of taking violence onto oneself for the sake of others. Only then can we respond adequately to violence: in the most difficult way. Maximilian Kolbe understood this. Jesus knew it too. As did Mahatma Gandhi. be the proponents of penal substitutionary models of the atonement seem to know it: but the challenge to them is to make good on their insights, rather than simply to (try to) enshrine them in crypto-Pauline dogmas about divine wrath and - bizarrely - in foundationalist epistemic principles.

What needs to be recognised above all is that for Jesus, the overriding concern was to plug a hole in the system of violence we all inhabit. He stood in the eye of the storm and took the consequences of worldly violence onto himself. He refused to shy away from it, and refused to respond to it in kind. He refused to avenge it. He tried instead to overcome it - by serving as a revolutionary exponent of a different kind of 'violence'. This violence would be restorative and constructive. It would be concerned with building up and seeking out, not breaking down and hiding away.

The tragedy is that only Jesus and a few other humans have ever shown themselves capable of such acts of constructive, restorative violence. The decision truly to suffer in place of others, for their sake and out of the desire to address the destructive violence the world wreaks on them, is a rare decision indeed. But it is the hallmark of true, full love to engage in constructive violence. Constructive violence in self sacrifice for others is the Christian calling. And its perpetrator is the holy spirit, whose divine fruit is forgiveness and the power truly to forgive. For those of us who have only a tiny taste of the fruit of this spirit - for those of us, that is, who can't think to give of ourselves enough to taste more - we can be comforted in our measure by the saving knowledge that our Lord knows and pities our weakness and has worked and is working - both in himself and in us - to address it.