Pray Tell is pleased to reprint, with permission, the Amen Corner from Worship 98 (October 2024). To subscribe to the journal Worship, visit the link here.
War: Liturgical, Metaphysical, In Real Life
War has dominated the news of the past two years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine renewed a constant news cycle with journalists on-site, interviewing eye- witnesses and reporting in real time. Then Hamas struck Israel, Israel invaded Gaza, and the insanity spilled over onto college campuses, into the halls of Congress, and into our living rooms.
War was present before Putin’s assault on Ukraine in February 2022, tearing asunder people’s lives in Tigray, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, and Afghanistan. War is always among us, even when we’re not debating whom we support and to whom we should send weapons.
Christians respond and react to war, like everyone else. At the organizational level, churches collect funds, initiate aid campaigns, and issue statements calling for ceasefires. Christians are active on the ground—humanitarian aid workers who enter into “safe” zones to evacuate refugees and provide food and clean water deserve special mention.
Liturgical specialists are often asked to contribute to the church’s response to war. Liturgists write prayers for the general public to download and for local ritual celebration. The real liturgists—God’s holy people, the priests, prophets, and kings gathered together in thanksgiving for Christ—pray for war to end.1 They pray for conflict resolution, the quieting of the passions, and the changing of hearts and minds.2 Essentially, the church prays for the aggressors to repent.
The church’s liturgical prayer for the end of war is about much more than hoping that perpetrators will stop the aggression. War is a frequent theme in liturgy. The blessing of waters at baptism petitions God to descend upon the waters and to cast out the dangerous creatures lurking there, especially evil spirits.3 The church has long imagined the anointing with holy oils, of catechu- mens and the myron, to be exorcistic.4 The church anoints candidates for baptism before they go into the water to prepare them for battle, giving them a protective layer against the evil spirits who await them there. In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem explained that stretching out their arms toward the West was a gesture of ending the covenant with the devil. The Byzantine churches instruct baptizands and their sponsors to breathe and spit on the devil—after renouncing him three times, just to be sure.5
St. Cyril admonished the neophytes to avoid returning to their old lives, lest they re-subordinate themselves to the tyranny of the devil, and suffer a fate akin to that of Lot’s wife (Gen 19:26).6 St. Ambrose explained that the wash- ing of the feet was necessary to prevent the devil from causing neophytes to stumble.7 At the Divine Liturgy, we confess our presence at the Lord’s table without the mediation of angels, those bodiless powers who protect us. We stand with them, and sing the Trisagion hymn praising God alongside them.8 Christians recite the Lord’s Prayer together, on their own, in every place, at any time, finishing with a simple and profound petition: “deliver us from the evil one.” The church does not merely have a vivid imagination: she is conscious of the active presence of evil spirits who are jealous of God and the covenant of love with God’s chosen people.
The war I describe here brings together the visible and the invisible—there is no barrier separating human beings from the invisible powers serving gods other than Jesus Christ. It is not just a metaphysical war—it is both metaphysi- cal and physical, which we know from the energy drain we experience after prayer. The life of St. Antony of Egypt depicts war so well—he fell, wounded and exhausted, in the desert tombs from the war he waged with the invisible powers.9 The church confessed then that the Holy Spirit led Antony into the desert, to fight the demons like Christ did in the gospels. We confess that the Spirit leads us into the wilderness to fight demons and invisible powers that serve other gods.
Naming the military commanders that wage war against us is possible. They go by names besides Legion. Traditionalists might prefer to use their older names: greed, gluttony, lust, and so on. Others might align demons with today’s vices: substance abuse and sex addiction. No one is immune to war, however. It rages for everyone—the assaults of thoughts, especially unwanted ones, come to us every day, and for some of us, all day and all night, too. The war waged to govern images and thoughts is no less fierce than the one bearing entertaining names.
Do you ever watch the clock, wondering if it’s any closer to lunch time? Meet the noonday demon who invites us to distract ourselves from boredom and monotony.10 Are you playing out an imaginary argument with relatives, friends, or exes, even when it never changes, like a repeat episode of a show that wasn’t so great in the first place? Hello, unwanted thoughts. Governing these thoughts is a battle. Monastics speak of resisting the logismoi—the torrent of words circulating in our brains and draining us of energy. Learning how to fast from the logismoi requires constant effort and prayer—true asceti- cism. The logismoi has a parallel in Buddhist psychology: castles of thoughts.11 People learn how to use the power of the mind in deciding whether or not to engage the thoughts, or set them aside for a time.
Christianity acknowledges the existence of a ferocious metaphysical war, without eliminating the physical dimension from the process of doing battle. It is not merely a matter of the evil one’s legions gathering their power for an assault on God. These battles take place in real people—their families, commu- nities, relations, and in their minds and hearts. The Christian tradition views the battle as one for dominion over people. The evil one desires to create a covenant with people to receive their adulation and worship.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009, has referred to the war in Ukraine as a metaphysical battle.12 He depicts the armies warring against one another on the ground as defenders of God’s righteousness. Kirill is part of a group of Russian thinkers who have revived the apostle Paul’s notion of a katechon—an epic battle in which a “restrainer” (katechon) will defeat the Antichrist.13
Patriarch Kirill and other leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church have described Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine as a necessary war defending the Fatherland and Christianity. In his sermon on Cheesefare Sunday, March 6, 2022, the Russian patriarch likened the war of the evil one’s minions and demons against God’s angels to the battles waged between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. He has justified the war in numerous sermons, speeches, and public appearances. His depictions do not differentiate the war involving missiles and drones that destroy hospitals, schools, and homes from Satan’s assault on God’s people. Ukrainian and Russian casualties are mind- boggling. Over seventeen million Ukrainians are in need of humanitarian assistance because of the war. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, claimed 1,200 lives.14 Over 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed.15
These “in-real-life” numbers from the wars waged on the ground in Ukraine and Palestine are staggering, and they do not account for the numbers of people suffering trauma because of economic instability, food insecurity, and broken families caused by fathers drafted for the fight and people forced to move to safer places.
Another frightening war waged in real life is the internal one. The US Surgeon General’s report on the epidemic of loneliness in America revealed new, stag- gering statistics.16 Surveys found that nearly one out of every four adults suffers from loneliness, with 47 percent feeling that their relationships are not mean- ingful, and 57 percent of Americans reporting that they eat meals alone. Prolonged loneliness has a negative impact on physical health. One could argue that the war people fight on the inside, from their own homes, both is ferocious and carries significant consequences for long-term public well-being.
The Christian corpus of monastic, ascetical, and hagiographical literature describes the arena people enter every day. The story of the conversion of
St. Antony, a hagiographical account also representing the monastic tradition, delivers a vivid description of Antony’s internal battles.17 He ventures into the desert, embraces a rugged life in a stone cave, and battles demons. The devil ambushes Antony with a series of temptations. He worries about his sister, whom he had relinquished to a convent. He remembers the comfort of his past life, possessing more than enough to live well from his parents’ inheritance. The devil assaults the young Antony with sexual temptation, appearing to him in the form of a beautiful boy. St. Athanasius, the author of this account, describes the emotional, mental, and physical toll Antony endures from the assaults. He lies on the floor of his cave, naked and gaunt, physically spent from hunger, exhausted from the energy required to endure these assaults.
Prayer is the first line of defense against these assaults: to call upon God, Mary, the saints, and guardian angels for assistance—invisible friends and loved ones freeing our feet from the snares of anguish and addiction, and providing us with companionship as we continue the journey.
From my perspective, these battles are real—no less so today than they were in antique to late-antique Christianity. Our invisible friends who love us are powerful advocates for our sake before God; they are also our companions. Our experience of these assaults, however, is not invisible; it is real in every human sense, and we feel them much as Antony did—physically, emotionally, and mentally.
As living and embodied human beings, we need the companionship of visible, embodied human beings to bolster our line of defense that repels the assaults of the evil one upon us. I would go so far as to argue that we do not have a chance to defeat the evil one without the visible companions joining us. Arguing that the invisible is enough is asking an incomplete church to gather, because the church is one, composed of both the invisible saints in heaven and the visible ones on earth. The prayer of the church that calls upon the God of all to fight for us must come from the whole church—invisible and visible. This was the case for the monks hearkening back to Antony’s time. It was not only the invisible saints who came to his aid; it was also the visible ones who came to him.18 St. Antony was an anchorite, living alone in the desert. Eventu- ally, people came to visit him, to seek his counsel, to tell his story. He was alone, but he wasn’t lonely. A community formed around him.
One of the lessons of St. Antony’s stories is that no one should ever be left alone to battle their demons. Addicts need sponsors. The sick need caretakers. The bereaved need consolers. Those battling mental and emotional illnesses need counselors. Orphans need foster parents. Widows and widowers need companions. Again, the invisible friends who come to our aid in our warfare against demons are formidable. The visible, embodied people of this world are just as necessary as the invisible powers of heaven.
The invisible and visible church prays for healing. Prayer is recited and sent up to God in formal petitions, wrapped in litanies and collects, sealed by a mighty “Amen.” Prayers are dialogical, taking place in conversation with our compan- ions, whose mere presence is an act of prayer.19 Prayers are inaudible when they come from the heart. The companion who sits and listens quietly to the com- plaints of their friend fighting one of these adversaries is praying silently. These types of prayer—official, private, communal, and, as Michael Plekon puts it, uncommon—are powerful and essential tools for this warfare.20 To put it simply and bluntly: these prayers work.
Christians have every reason to invest entirely in fervent prayer for the end of war and its humanitarian catastrophe. Prayers for the repentance of those who initiate military operations against neighboring countries can inspire prayers for the quieting of our own internal passions that urge us to inflict physical harm upon others. Prayers for the end of the suffering of those injured, trauma- tized, and displaced by war can lead to prayers for the thawing of our own hearts, to enact the boldness required to recognize the afflicted and provide them with food, shelter, education, and healthcare.
Prayers for the reconciliation of neighbors who have come to blows can evoke an internal examination of our own prejudices, trespasses, and biases that cause us to voluntarily rebuff those who are unlike us. Prayers for those who are in prison, the homeless, alcoholics, addicts of substance abuse, and sex workers and addicts can inspire us to entreat God to open our hearts to offer our love, compassion, affection, and companionship to those on the margins. Prayers for our enemies can inspire us to pray that God would remove the spirit of judgment from us.
The church is always at war in-real-life, but not with external omnipotent opponents. Christ defeated the ruler of this world once and for all through his death on the cross. There is no power, no array of forces, no new technology the evil one can harness or manufacture to overthrow God. The only device remaining for the evil one is to create and sustain war—the kind of war that rages between our countries, within our communities, and even within our- selves. The evil one has only one objective in waging this war—to steal the covenant we have with God and make it his own. The fundamental question posed to us—is the prayer to end war efficacious?—has an answer. The answer is yes, prayer does indeed work. Prayer works if we commend it to God in sincerity, if it is anchored in love for God, love for our neighbor, and, yes, love for ourselves.
There is no doubt that God hears all our prayers and stands ready to grant our petitions. Prayer is a dialogue. Do we hear God’s response? Do we desire repentance, the kind that begets true change? Are we willing to look ourselves in the mirror and take the fight to the afflictions wrought by the wars waged within us? And finally, can the innocents who suffer from war—metaphysical, physical, and in-real-life—count on the assistance of the people who make up the visible church, in the flesh? By our prayers, O God who loves humankind, may it be so.