The Sunday Reflection #24 - Is there any point praying for peace?

I had an absurd thought earlier. Has anyone ever prayed for unending war across the planet? Then a horrific thought came to me and I realised that the thought wasn't so absurd. Why? Well if you look at the global arms industry, the companies that make arms and the people who's jobs rely on it, and the people who's pensions are funded by companies that make arms, it is not so absurd at all. If we had 'World Peace' and it was enduring, a large number of people would feel a big hit in their pockets. What interests me is that the arms industry and it's lobbyists rarely call themselves arms dealers and manufacturers. They use terms like security. They emphasise the non military use of many of their developments, such as radar, jet engines, rockets, etc, all of which started life as militry equipment.

But the truth is that without situations like the Middle East and Ukraine, there would be a lot of people who would find their 'investments' to be worthless. Do any of them actually pray for new wars to start to line their pockets even more? Whether you look at the Middle East or Ukraine, every bullet, every rocket, every drone has been sold at a profit. Someone, somewhere has lined their pocket for every single item. If you have some spare cash and you want to make a profit, you could write down a list of all the arms companies listed on global stock markets and pull one out at random. You can be sure you'll get a nice dividend and the global situation will mean that the shares will rise.

If you are a Church going sort, every week your priest/vicar/whatever will exhort you to pray for peace, most likely leading a prayer and listing the places that are in the news this week. Chances are that there will be plenty of places missed off the list, such as Yemen and Sudan, simply because there are so many and us Westerner types care far more about countrys that have a European population. I would guess that people have prayed for peace, since the concept of Prayer was first invented by Adam and Eve (a figure of speech, I am sure someone will tell me someone else came up with it first).

Why do we bother? Given the billions of people who've prayed for peace in the world over millennia, is there any point? Does it do anything apart from make those of us saying the prayers feel slightly less bad about the fact that we are completely impotent when it comes to trying to stop war. When I was a teenage punk rocker, I followed a pacifist, anarchist band called Crass, who had a song called "Fight War Not Wars". It was a slogan that endured long after Crass faded away. One of Crass's ideas was that things like prayer was a waste of time, their songs were openly abusive about religion. Sadly singing songs proved no more effective than prayer. 

Is there any point at all in Prayer, especially to stop war, especially when all of the evidence is that it has no effect at all? This does trouble me. I often pray. Often for silly things, like to locate my wallet that has disappeared. More often than not, within a minute of saying a short prayer to St Anthony, it will pop up in the oddest places, such as in the fridge or in the dogs bed. I profusely thank St Anthony for his efforts and muse as to how it possibly made it's way there. My wife, having no faith, just assumes I'm an idiot and put it in the fridge when I got a cold beer out. In truth, it's usually her that finds it and will get irritated if she hears me thank St Anthony, given that she thinks she did the work. To me it works though. But whilst St Anthony can find a wallet in the fridge, it occurred to me that I had no idea who the patron Saint of Peace was. I know St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, so maybe he'd be best, but being a consciencios blogger, I did a quick google.

I was shocked to learn that despite being at thousands of masses in my life, I didn't know this and had never heard mention. It is such an important subject that there are two. There is St Francis of Assisi and St Isabella of Portugal. A terrible, wicked thought crossed my mind. Were the Church deliberately suppressing prayers to perfectly good saints, who mught do the business, because war is actually good for business? If a quick prayer to the pair of the could persuade all of these blood thirsty maniacs to have a change of heart, why on earth aren't we using their services? (for those of you unfamiliar with the concepts of Saints and Catholicism, the idea is that Patron Saints have the ear of the Lord and so ensure the job gets done). Or maybe, a more mundane answer is that in truth, the top brass in our churches have realised that in a match between the saints and the blokes with wonga, the saints will come second.

I suspect that whilst so many people are lining their pockets handsomely and paying off politicians to do their bidding, the idea of peace is a forlorn hope. We have created a world where millions are living in fear of death, where whole continents are suffering drought and famine, because we are spending money on arms rather than fixing people's lives. When I was an idealsitic teenager and young adult, I believed our generation would do better. I believed that bands like Crass singing fight war not wars would open our eyes and make us reject the greedy ways that provides the breeding ground for war and conflict. 

A lovely old lady once told me that if you were praying for something, God only listened if you believed with all your heart and all of your mind that God would answer your prayer. Maybe the reason all of our prayers for peace fail is because we are so ground down that we say them knowing they'll be ignored. So is there any point at all praying for peace? I've spent years thinking about this. I have changed my mind many times, sometimes through despair, such as when Russia invaded Ukraine. Sometimes in joy, when the Northern Irish peace deal was done. 

Where I am now is this. I believe it is encumbant on our religious leaders to show proper moral leadership in this matter. I'll try a little prayer to the two patron saints of peace tonight, but should I wake up tomorrow and Putin & the rest haven't had a change of heart, I will conclude that until all of the leaders of faiths get together and publicly state that this has to stop and that waging war and selling arms at huge profit is immoral, then the rest or our prayers will go unanswered. But if you want to carry on trying, then that's fine as well. Surely sooner or later, humanity will wake up to the fact that the warmongerers are ruining are planet and they have to stop? If we don't then I don't think even God will bother to help us.