An Oblation for Peace

A call for prayer and fasting in a time of war

While too many ecclesial leaders play political power games, while those in positions of trust and power push boorish agendas on the faithful, war, disaster and rancor consume whole societies. A fire of chastisement is visited on all of us and no one is excused for inaction. Well past time for the Church to take stock of its activities and for her shepherds to come to their senses: this is the hour for those who dare to pray. More than wishful thinking or prosaic verbiage, Christians must not delay to enter the heart of God until the hearts of men receive His peace. Foregoing earthly comforts and humble tears are the keys to the Father’s heart. The battle for justice and mercy is waged by acts of justice and mercy, and the battle for peace by acts of prayer and fasting.

Such prayer ardently seeks a deeper solidarity with the suffering, and in this solidarity, fasts for the power of God to be revealed. Christ crucified won for us the right to pray this way in His name and to bear away the sins of the world in our own sacrifices and renunciations by His blood. The filial of God suffered all the cruel hostility that rages in a world subject to sin and death, but He was not overcome. When all seemed most lost, the Father’s love raised His Son from death and so it raises all who cling to the Risen Lord. When the Word became flesh, the eternal sonship of God entered into humanity so that sinners might gain this same access to the Father’s love, the access that a son has to his father’s heart. It is the Son of Mary’s unvanquished love that lives in the heart of Christian prayer so that those who raise their voices to God for even strangers and enemies secure blessings that the world would otherwise never know.

When good soldiers must face the horror of battle and defenseless families huddle in shocked terror, the Christian enters their plight and bears it with them through beseeching God on their behalf and renouncing food and drink. By being generous to the poor he sees, God’s loving kindness is given to those he does not see. Placing broken lives and shattered hearts on the altar, the person of prayer finds the courage that comes from Christ to offer worship that is right and just.

Feeling the hunger and thirst of God for peace, those men and women who embark on this journey of fervent prayer learn the wisdom of humble and reverent intercession. Such an intercessor may not hear the agony of those who walk in the shadow of death, but through the power of the Holy Spirit he might still feel the fear, pain and despair that those he does not know now suffer. Their plight might just yet still pierce him to the heart. His job is to suffer in the Holy Spirit with them and to offer to God their cries in his own cries.

When prayer seems impossible and inadequate but we choose to pray anyway, the power of the Church’s intercession becomes the world’s only hope. Heart speaks to heart - and God has chosen to comfort and protect those who most need his peace through the prayers of those who pray. Through those who pray, the most hardened hearts can be moved to mercy and the most vengeful to forgiveness. The plans of those who love violence and chaos can be thwarted. Through the prayer of faith, the most certain disaster is relieved and the harshest chastisement turned back. This is true not merely in some generalized way for some faceless mass of statistics. It is most true for those particular souls in the most impossible concrete situations in the very moment a prayer of faith is offered up.

God’s love not only binds us to each other, but when we are joined in prayer even with those who cannot pray, His power triumphs over evil. Such praying and fasting souls make themselves oblations to merciful love - the blessings unleashed through them at once confound the world and pull it back to the wholesomeness for which it aches. They hold nothing back because God yearns to hold nothing back, and through their acts of love, even when offered on dying lips and by bodies to sick and crippled to stand, the peace of heaven storms bastions of strife on earth.

When a Christian chooses this path of oblation, a passage to Golgotha opens before him. Under Christian prayer’s cruciform shadow, there is a chance to act in ways that otherwise would not have been possible. If such acts rarely seem of any significance at the time, it is because God prefers to work in what is small, hidden, and regarded by all others as inconsequential. But by prayer and fasting, these humble efforts make space for God to do something in the world, something extraordinary and powerful, something that God himself yearns to do but is waiting for a heart humble and obedient enough to give Him space to do it.