We Pray Earnestly for What We Desire for Ourselves or Others
"Gospel Nonviolence or more precisely Gospel Nonviolent Love of all in all circumstances, is ultimately and always a spiritual matter, a matter whose significance begins and ends beyond time. because it is ultimately and always about God and God's will. If it is not about this, it is just more chaotic noise gushing from the theological Tower of Babel, which we humans have constructed as an escape from God and God's will.
If God does not exist, then nonviolence is only a whole bunch of totally perishable syllables clanging and boombing together signifying nothing. Or, as Gandhi succinctly put it, 'If God is not love, nonviolence is impossible." He embraces two presuppositions here: God is and God is love. [and by love, he explicitly says he means the agape of the New Testament.] So, in order to accept Jesus' Way in the Gospels of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, God who is love must exist.
If God exists, then when we pray we are not talking to ourselves or into a void. Someone who loves us and humanity is listening. If our prayer is that we, our Church and all the people of God do His will as He revealed it by word and deed when He "became flesh, then our prayer is a request to unite our wills, all Christians' will and the wills of all the people of God to His will as He revealed it when He walked about the earth as one of us in all things but sin. It is in the uniting of my will with Thy will that God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
In my fifty-seven years of commitment and involvement with Gospel Nonviolence on a multiplicity of levels, there is a petitionary prayer that I have seldom heard placed before God by the Churches or by Christians, who believe that Jesus is Nonviolent.That not often heard prayer is for the grace to restore the Christian Church to proclaiming as it did in the beginning what Jesus proclaimed about violence and enmity.
Christians and their Churches sometimes pray that God will bestow His grace on humanity or on some segment of humanity to stop a particular evil, e.g., war in the Ukraine or Gaza. But, rarely, if ever, does the prayer rise up like incense before God that the Holy One will send down the grace on me and my Church and on the people of God to commit to following the Way He reveals via His Incarnation, as the only Way to break the chains of evil and death, violence and enmity, revenge and resentment that have the institutional Church and all humanity imprisoned in a perpetual evil for evil cycle. A cycle that must inevitably bring forth the mutually assured spiritual, moral, physical, emotional and psychological destruction of all parties and their future generations.
Now one would think that there would be no more natural or proper spiritual activity for a Church or for a Baptized disciple of Jesus than to ardently and continuously pray for the grace to proclaim by word and deed what their Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ infallibly proclaimed by word and deed during His travels between Bethlehem and Golgotha.
Unfortunately, this has rarely been the case over the last 1700 years. Petitionary prayers that the grace be given to restore the Churches to proclaiming what Jesus proclaimed in the Gospels regarding violence and enmity have seldom reached the ears of God because seldom have they been spoken by individual Christians or by Churches.
Maybe this AD 2023 Advent Season is an opportune time to begin to flood heaven with such a request. "Flood" is an exceedingly hopeful word choice in this contect, since each of us is but a drop of petionary water. Every flood, however, is what it is by the accumulation of little drops of water. If you would like to begin during this Advent Season to flood the Heart of God with cries for the Churches of Jesus Christ to return to the teaching of Jesus Christ on violence and enmity, there is below and attached a short petitionary prayer with which you, personally, or your Church can begin to be restored to Jesus' Gospel Truth and its Divine Power and Wisdom.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org