Praying the Kingdom

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Charles Elliott

When Jesus told his disciples to pray for the Kingdom, he assumed that they knew how to go about it. That may strike us as odd. After all, the disciples specifically and explicitly asked, not what to pray for, but how to pray. And Jesus answered by telling them to pray that the Kingdom, his Father's Kingdom may come. When we start to pray the Kingdom, what are we doing?

Most of this chapter is a demolition job. For it is easier to be clear about what praying the Kingdom is not than to define precisely what it is. Like the pork butcher looking for the lost sovereign in the salami sausage, let us slice away what is not relevant to our purposes.

There is a tendency deep in us all to assume that we know the shape of the Kingdom. We may admit under pressure that we don't know every detail, every hillock, but we are sure we know the main features of the topography. Secure in this knowledge, or rather pseudo-knowledge, we seek to impose it on God. We want a Kingdom where what we perceive to be Christ's values are given political expression; where mercy, forgiveness, harmony, mutuality, are given institutional and relational flesh. Our difficulty, often only-half acknowledged, is that there is a great gulf between these values and their incarnation in the meat of political life. There is thus the danger that our prayer for the Kingdom becomes an ineffectual longing for the gulf to be bridged. 'If only the government would show mercy to the unemployed, O Lord'; or 'Let the State Department learn that harmony in the Caribbean Basin requires a total rethink of American policy on Cuba.'

From this kind of ineffectual longing for our present institutions and political mechanisms to incarnate certain values, it is but a short step to our prayer becoming little more than a political shopping list, a platform, a manifesto. 'May we have a more humane policy on employment; and that, Lord, means a proper balance of Keynesian and monetarist policies; more resources in training and labour mobility . . . Oh, and Lord, don't forget to do something about the exchange rate . . .' I burlesque only to paint up the absurdity. God neither needs nor wants a check list of policies that should be pursued in the preparation of his Kingdom.

There is here, however, a somewhat deeper point that ties in with some of the material of the last chapter. If we reduce the nature of the Kingdom to no more than a political manifesto we miss the whole point of the radical demand of the Kingdom. The politics of the Kingdom spring from fundamental reorderings of values, perceptions, world-views; without that deeper level of transformation the supersession of one political agenda by another is not only unlikely to be very effective: it is simply irrelevant. That may seem hard. 'How can it be irrelevant to the unemployed if policy changes so that they get proper training to enable them to get a good job? There's nothing irrelevant about that form where they stand.' No doubt: but if the policy change is brought about-only to win votes or manipulate a given sectional interest, the -unemployed will soon find that they - or some other vulnerable group - are again sacrificed to another political reality. If politics is played like chess, shoving pieces around a two dimensional board, the Kingdom cannot come. Yet when we reduce prayer for the Kingdom to a political agenda, we are making the Kingdom two dimensional despite the fact that the consistent theme of Jesus' teaching on the Kingdom is that it is multidimensional, involving liberating change at many levels.

This 'agenda approach' to prayer for the Kingdom contains within it another, somewhat analogous, difficulty. If I am sure that my agenda is God's agenda, I easily get impatient with those who stand in the way of its immediate implementation. At its crudest this degenerates into a political goodies and baddies charade, rather like poor Westerns, with the goodies in white hats and the baddies in black hats. This easy dichotomy is not only naive politics; it is bad prayer because it leads us to a more or less conscious writing-off of our political opponents. 'God rot Senator X because he's against civil rights.' However strange or perverse it may sometimes seem, God is not in the least likely to answer such prayer because he is not much into rotting people, even those who propound policies that are hard to reconcile with the Kingdom of the God of love.

None the less, most of us at some time in our lives come up against people who, in one way or another, represent or even incarnate a reality of evil that has to be withstood. While prayer for the Kingdom may not be a generalized curse on our political enemies, how does it react to the observed embodiment of evil in the political figures we encounter or are exposed to?

That there can be no compromise with the evil thus embodied needs no emphasis. As we shall see later in this chapter, the gospel accounts of the crucifixion give us some helpful guidance on prayer for the Kingdom, and in Jesus' encounter with the agents of evil, for him at that moment the incarnation of evil, we see how he dealt with this situation. 'Father, forgive them: they don't know what they're doing.' Jesus sees beyond them, to the deeper, larger reality that they cannot see. Blind, they cannot be blamed for the damage they do. As persons, they can only be the objects of forgiveness, unconscious as they may be of their need for it; resentful indeed of the gift as they may be.

So far from prayer for the Kingdom encouraging or even tolerating hostility towards those we identify as political foes, it requires us to see beyond the personalities involved to the reality of the evil of which they have become the agent. This is not simply a matter of 'hating the sin but loving the sinner': it is the process of detaching the individual from the forces of evil of which he has become the willing accomplice.

It is surprising - or, on reflection, perhaps it is not - how-one's rhetoric turns and hits one in the eye. 1 wrote the paragraphs above secure in objectivity, the abstract removal from the immediate, where academics and poets are most comfortable. I then heard that the British government was planning to reduce its expenditure on overseas aid by £160 million, an amount equal to three times that which the international aid charities raise each year. The effect would be to reduce by nearly a quarter Britain's bilateral aid - at a time when over ten million people are at risk of starvation in the Sahel. Virtually every commentator agrees that the Sahelian/Ethiopian tragedy requires huge long-term aid commitments to boost food production, and yet the British government would now be seeking to reduce its already exiguous efforts in this direction. I know the ministers concerned quite well; we are on first-name terms and deal affably with each other across a half-acknowledged ideological gulf. I now have to live out the previous paragraph. While actively campaigning for their removal from office - with all that that means for them personally, in family terms and professionally - I have both to detach them from the actions to which they are party; to love them as men in and through that detachment; and to confront the world view (and the action that flows from it) which sees tax-cuts for the relatively wealthy in Britain as having a higher ethical claim than aid for the absolutely poverty-stricken in Africa. I do not find that easy - either loving the people so that I want them to see how far removed what they are doing is from the ethos of the Kingdom, or confronting the evil.

In the former, I am helped by a story from Yevtushenko's autobiography. He tells how, in Moscow in 1941, the streets were lined with people, mostly women, waiting for a great parade of German prisoners. The atmosphere of hatred was palpable. Nearly every woman had lost husband, father, brother or son, and now was their chance to desecrate the symbols of those who had killed their menfolk. The Germans came into view ' . . . thin, unshaven, wearing dirty bloodstained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades . . . the streets became dead silent. An old woman pushed through the crowd, past the police cordon and, taking something from her coat, pushed it into the pocket of an exhausted soldier - a crust of black bread. And now suddenly from every side women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.'

It is the second clement, confronting the evil, that is harder, both conceptually and psychically. What does it mean in this particular case this particular morning? It means opening myself to the force of evil, not analysing it or describing it or attributing it: just standing in front of it, letting it break all over me, surge around me like a wild Orcadian sea . . . That, however, is too passive, though as we shall see at the end of this chapter, the passivity is critical and finally creative. Somehow, the puny resources of my spiritual strength, what some people call my 'soul force', have to be mobilized against this evil. It is no good hitting back at the sea, or at the wind that drives it. Yet the elemental forces of wind and weather have to be resisted by forces of love and inner capacity to transcend them. It is there that we meet both our own powerlessness and the power of God.

The confrontation with disincarnate evil is an ultimate spiritual contest. There is, however, a bogus version of this contest. Put at its crudest, this is the rehearsal before God of political grievances; the recital of a reverse shopping list of social or political shortcomings. 'Lord, we hate the abuse of power by the police; the overcrowding in our prisons; the inadequacy of our legal aid schemes . . .' This is neither a proper wrestling with evil; nor a costly opening of the soul to the love and power of God. At its worst it is a self-indulgent reinforcement of our own partialities which does nothing to mobilize our own or anyone else's spiritual energies. Indeed it can strengthen the power of both guilt and powerlessness and thus make real, prayer the more difficult.

Perhaps an abuse of prayer for the Kingdom more common than disguised hatred of political opponents or the rehearsal of grievances may be labelled ideological buttressing. Let me illustrate. On my first visit to Nicaragua I was taken to a show-parish of the 'new' basic Christian communities, in a poor suburb of Managua which had been the centre of the resistance to the dictator Somoza. The present parish priest had been one of the first of the Catholic clergy to throw in his lot with the Sandinistas, and so it was no surprise to find liberation theology in rude health in this parish. What was more surprising, and to my narrow, WASP-ish mind distasteful, was the simplicity with which the Kingdom was identified with the Sandinist revolution. Even at the heart of the liturgy, priest and people hopped easily from biblical language to revolutionary slogans, and as easily back again. Prayer for the Kingdom thus became prayer for the success of the revolution. So far, so (relatively) good. What was missing, however, was any acknowledgment either that the revolution may be less than perfect or that for it to succeed in any ultimate sense, transformation of individual, corporate and social consciousness would be necessary. In thus criticizing, I am not impugning either the sincerity of the people involved, nor the validity of their conviction that in the revolution they had seen the politics of the Magnificat come alive. They had, however, neglected the deeper truths of their own liberation theologians. Prophets like Guttierez and Miranda would never condone so simplistic a parallel between any earthly regime and the Kingdom.

I mention this example because we always see ideological buttressing more clearly when it is someone else's ideology that is being buttressed. How much harder it is to detect the same process when it is our own values and perceptions that are being affirmed in the process of prayer. My own tradition, the Church of England, is particularly vulnerable to this abuse of prayer for the Kingdom, not only because of its position as the established religion of the land, with all that that implies in terms of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the uncritical accommodation of the rich and the powerful, but also because of the symbiosis of the Church of England and English political and literary culture for at least 300 years. It is, for example, quite illuminating to examine the various liturgies of the Church of England from the Reformation to the issue of the current Alternative Service Book. One will find varying degrees of emphasis on prayer for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable. One will find no prayer for the rich, the successful or the aggressive. While there are prayers for the institutions of state - the monarch, parliament, the courts - there are no prayers that so much as hint at the terrible ambiguity of worldly power. On the contrary it is assumed that power is, and will be, used for the 'maintenance of religion and godly virtue'. The notion that the powers that be are to be confronted, challenged, chased back to a proper appreciation of their nature and purposes is to glimpse a world view quite alien to any prayer book ever adopted by the Church of England - or, for that matter, the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. We should be careful, therefore, of the common assumption that it is only revolutionary priests in Latin America who use prayer for the Kingdom as an ideological buttress.

No less destructive is the process by which prayer is used as the reverse of a buttress - a battering ram. Faced with a complacent, complaisant, lazy congregation, what young minister has not felt the urge to shock, to challenge, to offend? While it may be true, as a feminist theologian in the United States put it, that 'what the Church needs is a good kick in the rear', prayer for the Kingdom is not that kick. It may . need that kick, or the shock or the offence, but it needs it as a precondition, as the prise de conscience of which we were thinking in the last chapter. Neither public nor private prayer is likely to come alive if it degenerates into disguised conscientization classes. Indeed those who use public prayer in that way need to reflect on what that habit says about their own power vis-à-vis those to whom they imagine they are ministering.

So far this chapter has been a list of negatives: of what  prayer for the Kingdom is not. It is now time to try to pull together the few positive leads that have appeared and say what it is. To do so we need to go back to the discussion of the incarnation of evil, of threats to the Kingdom. Those are, in the majority of cases, threats to the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable. For the Kingdom is for them first. The Kingdom is where earthly, ego-dominated values are turned upside down, so that the dispossessed possess; the have-nots have: the powerless achieve their ambitions; the outcasts are invited in. As Daniel Berrigan puts it:

Heaven of such imperfection -Wary, ravaged, wild? Yes; compel them in.

The Kingdom is thus the triumph of the last over the first, of the humble over the proud, the ordinary over the exotic. Political spirituality is in part opening the inner self to the presence, the actual and spiritual reality, of these people, the inheritors of the Kingdom. It is being alive to them, welcoming them in, standing alongside them.

Is the language of that sentence metaphorical or actual? It is both. For it is only when we can, naturally and joyfully, welcome the poor and the oppressed into our community, our homes, our family that we can, with integrity, welcome them into our souls. It is only when we stand alongside them on picket lines or dole queues or protest marches that we can claim honestly to stand alongside them at the still centre of our prayer life.

But is it as easy, as absolute as that? It is important to get the nuance right. I am well aware that I am very English, middle-class, slightly intellectual, shy, a clergyman . . . How can I genuinely identify with striking miners in South Wales or starving peasants in Mali? To welcome them into my home would be more embarrassing for them than for me. To stand alongside them would amuse them for its incongruity. Like Dr Johnson's dog, they would marvel not that I did it well or naturally, but that I did it at all. Try as I might, I cannot be other than I am. For better or worse, this is what God made me and I have trouble enough coming to terms with that, without trying to be something quite other.

And yet . . . And yet, unless I am moving towards that degree of empathy, of friendliness, of readiness to share, that would culminate in real welcome, actual standing alongside, there is little prospect of my being able to open myself to the poor at a deeper, more inward level. While we may, with proper caution, reject the absolutist position - 'in order to pray for the Kingdom, I must be on the picket line' - we have to be on the way to the state of consciousness that would make being on the picket line entirely feasible and appropriate. It will be surprising if that dynamism of consciousness does not involve, sooner or later, actually getting to know poor people as people. Sure we may find it hard to get to know African peasants or sweated labourers in Asia, but the call to prayer for the Kingdom is a call to know, to be acquainted with, the poor and marginalized in our own community,

The French language draws a distinction between savoir, to know a fact, and connaitre, to know a person. Is it unfair to say that Christians are in general much better at savoir than at connaitre when it comes to the people of the Kingdom? We tend to know the facts of deprivation, to know about injustice, exploitation, impoverishment. Trapped in our social classes, our literary ghettoes and above all in our ecclesiastical palaces, we are much less good at being acquainted with the victims of injustice or poverty. We do not, in general, find them in our churches. (And if they are there they feel they. need to come in disguise — and that is perhaps the hardest judgment they can pass on us). The one social environment in which savoir ought routinely to be translated into connaitre is usually one which insulates us most effectively from that translation.

I began to see some of the implications of that last Christmas. Being a 'spare' priest, I had been invited to assist in the Midnight Mass at one of our great London cathedrals. It was an awe-inspiring occasion: a huge and ancient church filled to capacity, superb music, rich vestments, stately liturgy, genuine worship offered in the best Anglican tradition. I have to confess it left me largely unmoved, almost alienated, even angry. I walked home, across the River Thames, back to the rather less fashionable area of south London where I live. Near my home are two shelters for the single homeless, a middle-class euphemism for methies and dossers. They were out in force that night. I was caught up in a weaving, wobbling human tide of sweating, swearing, singing, smelling men and women as they celebrated they knew not what, with an abandon and a welcome that the liturgy I had just left totally lacked. The liturgy had prayed, in beautifully crafted prose, for those people. Yet I could not help thinking that I was more likely to find Christ enjoying his birthday here than across the river. He, at least, would insist on connaitre, while in the cathedral congregation, so edified by the beauty of holiness, we had been content to remain in the safety of savoir.

Prayer for the Kingdom, then, begins with a psychic, spiritual opening to the poor, which is likely to be dialectically related to an actual process of becoming acquainted with the poor. This inward opening to the poor is held in counterpoint to an inward opening to God, to his infinite love and his infinite power of transformation. It is thus a simultaneous standing in the presence of the poor and of God; a baring of the deepest parts of one's being to the stuff of the Kingdom and the King.

Put like that, it is too static, too immobile. One is standing in the presence of the victims of evil to expose them to the redemptive,   transformative  love  of God.  To use another language, one is adding one's own soul-force to the cosmic struggle of the love of God against the powers of darkness on behalf of their victims. Whatever language one uses, and all at this point are inadequate, there are four elements: the poor (a shorthand for all who suffer from the sin of their fellow men); the power of sin; the love of God; and you or me or whoever. At its most abstract, prayer for the Kingdom is confronting the power of sin in the love of God to liberate the poor.

Some will say that that is far too abstract. They will be wary of language like 'sin', and will want to particularize, to name policies such as apartheid, nuclear defence, colonialism, or labour exploitation. My difficulty about this is that it is a slippery slope which too easily results in us telling the King what his Kingdom should be like. At Mineral Point in Wisconsin, you may see a tapestry or sampler worked by the wife of a Cornish tin miner brought in to mine the local lead. The design of the sampler includes a cross, but the cross itself is unfinished. The old Cornish lady deliberately left it like that to emphasize that human comprehension can never finally contain the wonder and love of God. In much the same way, I believe, prayer for the Kingdom at its most powerfully meditative has to leave the detail unfinished. It  has to depend finally and completely on the grace of God, and commit the supplicant and both the victims and the perpetrators of evil to that grace, that graciousness.

It goes almost without saying that that act of final commitment, with the purity of abstraction from the realities of everyday experience that it implies, is not easily achieved -any more than the depths of any meditative discipline are easily achieved. We shall return to this in later chapters.

The key point that needs to be grasped now, however, is that prayer for the Kingdom transcends the partialities of any political position we can define for ourselves. In that sense, it is dealing with ultimates rather than proximates, with eternal dimensions rather than temporal situations. That does not mean it ignores the real to concentrate on the unreal, or that-it is so heavenly minded it is no earthly good. It is simply to insist that we recognize whose Kingdom it is, and that we honour the King.

I conclude this chapter by rooting this discussion in familiar biblical material. The choice of that material was suggested by a neighbour, a religious sister who specializes in spiritual direction. She often gives aspirants the exercise of imaginatively attending the scene of the crucifixion. She encourages them to enter deeply into that moment of history; to imagine the sounds, the smells, the light, the feel, the atmosphere; to look deeply into the faces of people standing round the cross; to watch and particularly listen to the Lord, as, struggling for breath, he heaves himself into a more erect position on the cross, defying the pain in his feet and wrists, to gain a lungful of air . . . 'Now,' she says, 'you are there: what do you do?'  ...

'And the extraordinary thing is', she tells me, 'that, almost without exception, men can't take it. They go away. They simply can't stand watching that intensity of suffering. So they slope off. Women can't stand it, either. But they are determined to save him. So they fling themselves at the cross to cut him free. Or they start rallying the crowds to take on the Roman soldiers. The one thing they can't manage in the face of such evident wretchedness is inactivity.'

The one person who did manage inactivity in that it situation was Mary. She watched from a little way oil as her son died. She entered his suffering as only a mother can and, we may assume, laid it alongside the conviction that he was no ordinary son. The reader may care to use that scene as meditative material before continuing to the next chapter - the scene of, Mary watching the crucifixion.

It would be good to dwell on three aspects. First, Mary does not shrink from the horror of it. The blood is real blood. The fighting for breath is a desperate struggle for survival. The sense of abandonment is total. Second, she stays - and stays inactive, practically immobile. She does not try to organize a coup or lead a demonstration against the Sanhedrin, or abuse the cohort of soldiers. She stays and takes in the horror and the suffering. Third, we may assume that she is offering the whole event to God as she experiences it. The whole event. She is aware of the hypocrisy of the crowd, some of whom were healed by Jesus. She is aware of the self-righteousness of the Pharisees and religious establishment. She is aware of the callousness of the soldiers. She is all too aware of the timidity and gutlessness of the disciples and of how that, above all else, hurts her son now. And she offers all of that to God - quietly, silently, inwardly - while she is lacerated with all the emotion of a mother watching a favoured son, a son with the finger of God on him, die the cruellest death.

If we can enter into Mary's experience, we are beginning to know what prayer for the Kingdom involves.