Loving my Enemies

A few years ago Pope Francis reminded me of a method of praying that I learned as a child. Francis, while arguing that praying doesn’t need to be difficult, suggested an easy way to organise your intercessions-- assign one finger to a category of people: 

Touch your thumb and remember those who are closest to your heart

Touch your pointer and remember your teachers and those that give you guidance and direction.

Touch your middle finger and pray for your leaders

Touch your ring finger –the weakest finger--and pray for those who are sick or poor or vulnerable.

Touch your pinkie—and prayer for your self.

I have one basic problem with this method of praying: when do I pray for my enemies?

I decided that I might as well include them with “my leaders” especially since often they are the same people.

So friends, for several years I have been praying for my leaders (and my enemies) with my middle finger up.

Okay, so I am mostly joking....

But I need to confess that I feel real rage against the president of the United States. His recent tweet about the “ratings” of his nightly covid-19 briefing made be seethe through clenched teeth. His attacks on the governor of Michigan and his threat that only states where people are nice to him get life-saving equipment made me want to punch a hole in the wall.

An uncomfortable revelation has come to me:

I hate him.

This is not just political disagreement ... I deeply disagree politically with Doug Ford, the premiere of Ontario, but I confess that he is doing agood job responding to the Covid-19 crisis. He is showing compassion, wisdom, a willingness to listen to experts.

It is my sense that Dr. Fauci and others are having to do a lot of ego stoking and cajoling to keep their critical jobs of mitigating the danger to the American people. Trump is the Emperor who has no clothes, and I am sick of having to turn the other way in disgust as my fellow Americans ooh and ahh about his clothing—he is a great business man, what a great leader, straight shooter, true defender of the faith.

Thousands upon thousands of American will die because of the way he handled the critical first 6 weeks of this crisis.

This doesn’t get me around Jesus’ instruction to pray for those who persecute or Paul’s instruction to pray for governing officials....A friend who volunteered with Christian Peacemaker Teams told me once that praying for your enemies can’t be reduced to praying against them or even just praying for their conversion and reformation. You need to actually robustly pray for them: for their family, health, for goodness to come their way.  I am not sure that I have this in me. I can see perhaps why this might be an important spiritual discipline. Martin King would remind us that we need to separate the existential nature of people (their evil, sin, fallenness) from their essential nature (that they are image bearers of God). We need to correct and resist people in the frame of their existential nature while always holding on the created goodness of every human being.

This, I guess, is a pretty fancy way of saying love the sinner, but hate the sin.

I guess that praying for someone’s concrete good is a reminder that, though marred by sin, our enemies are still the beloved children of God. My enemies are not God’s enemies.

But I am still going to be praying with my middle finger up and this is why:

I don’t think that the point of prayer is that we come to God perfectly composed and with all of our mishmash of feelings all sorted. God is the one for whom every heart is open; every thought known. There is no reason for trying to pretend to God that I am wearing fancy clothes when I am naked as a jaybird.

The best I can do is to ask God to help me to sort out the broken centers and jaded edges of my thoughts and feelings and intentions.

May God make me more than I can be on my own, Amen.