The Already and the Not Yet

Yet another mesmeric TV drama is getting under way on BBC1. It is brilliantly directed, meticulously observed in both character and location and altogether compelling. But the problem for some of us viewers, with regard to the options available to us on evening television, lies in the fact that we are not exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding between light and darkness. It is mainly darkness of varying degrees and kinds – ranging from the morbid and frightening to the banal and plain boring that gets served up most evenings. I do not blame television producers for this. It is we viewers who provide the ratings, after all, and we seem to rate the dark very highly. Perhaps the same can be said of the news. Bad news is always good news.

Recently though, we have had a glimmer of genuinely good news where the turmoil in the Middle East is concerned. It is a glimmer, and not a blinding light, which is perhaps a sign of its goodness. It is encouraging, not so much because the diplomatic work being instigated by the Russians might just work out, but because it indicates that human beings can occasionally surprise themselves by the good they are capable of doing. There is the faintest possibility of détente if the Russians succeed in persuading the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons and allow them to be destroyed. As with the perhaps intended delay of Congress and the House of Representatives in deciding whether or not they are prepared to back the President in targeted strikes, it provides a breathing space, or perhaps a stepping stone or two, as a means for all the major players in this lethal game to get out of the corners they have painted themselves into, without losing face. Let us hope that we don’t lose sight of this opportunity in arguments about who had the idea first.

A week or so ago, before the Pope put out his plea for prayer, or before the World Community for Meditation called on all its members to pause at noon on Saturday to pray for Syria, no such initiative had yet been dreamed of. There is no way of telling whether prayer made any difference, of course, because prayer operates on an entirely different level of consciousness and ultimate connectedness to that of the so called ‘real’ world.

We are connected to one another as families of individuals and ultimately as a family of nations, all held within the embrace of a loving God. We and God are an integrated whole. Even though that integration is constantly being threatened by conflict, something greater seems to be at work mending us, moving us on and remaking us, even in the midst of our own destructive actions, our own collective sin. The poet, George Herbert, would have called this benign force the 'engine' of prayer.  

Prayer is effected in a different dimension of time and movement, one in which the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ somehow occur together. When people come together to pray they are working with God’s own energy for the good. The engine of prayer, fuelled and fired by the love of God, overcomes the darkness with the light which it generates. It also beats to a different time. It beats to the rhythm of the heart of God. The prayer which is going on now for Syria and the Middle East has its origins in God who is from always to always, and whose energy will continue ‘unto the ages’ or ‘for ever and ever’, irrespective of who is doing the work of prayer and when it is being done. So the battle is, in a sense, already won and yet not quite won.

Action and initiative for the good in the present Middle East conflict are a sign of the Wisdom of God at work. The word ‘wisdom’ can also be translated as ‘spirit’. This opportunity for the good, initiated by Russia, and quickly endorsed by all parties to the conflict, has enormous potential for reconciliation both in the world and, because they are working together, for Christians of every denomination. The Pope’s call for prayer brings together the desires of the nations, which is really a deep desire for peace, and holds them in the desire of all Christians which is for the healing of those nations and of its own fragmented body, the Church.