A (Yet) Stranger Prayer for Peace

One thing I know for sure:

I haven't got the slightest makings of a martyr, much less a prophet or seer. So I know that I know I'm not the only one, even within my local circle of church friends and associates, who has felt a near-desperate need to pray and fast for the state of our poor Union over this 4th of July weekend.

So what's the problem with us prayer-warriors? Why aren't we all rapidly becoming something more on the order of a gathering and swelling army? What's making it so hard for us to correspond and co-ordinate, at whatever distance we happen to be, in this (last time I looked) still-globalizing world? Certainly nothing these days seems to keep larger and more complicated human entities - particularly the prouder they are of their bigness, and the more jealous and ravenous they are to extend their influence - from co-ordinating and even combining across today's globe. But more on that presently.

Anyhow, needless to say I haven't any answers to the questions of the preceding paragraph. But I can tell you in any case what I've been praying for - concerning America - over these past four days.

Briefly, it is for the preservation of something I venture to call her real diversity. As distinct from any mere ideological kind. To begin with, I pray my country will remember that she is far more than any one thing, or combination of things (influences, currents, lobbies, ideologies, etc), that would try to congeal, harden, broad-stroke, streamline or homogenize - or brutalize - either

        (1) herself;
        (2) her Idea of herself (whatever that's supposed to mean); or
        (3) her presence and influence in the world.

Above all, she is more than whatever makes her nowadays feel SO big and sprawling, endangered and besieged, angry and lunging and ravenous that (if I may rehash an old Western movie cliche) this earth just ain't big enough for the both of us. Both of us - as in, say, America and China. Much less any three or four or five of us. I pray in particular that she remember she is more, even today, than Washington, or Wall Street. Or even Silicon Valley. Or any other influence, however brilliantly successful or profitable, that disposes her to feel like - or worst of all, makes her feel she has no rational choice but to act like - a behemoth or leviathan. And in what to me seems more and more to be a thriving age of such monsters.

So yes, even in this hypermilitarized, devoutly corporatized Early Twenty-First Century, I believe America remains so much more than any of her (self-)stereotypes. Even as that sprawling, ravenous thing we call the Chinese mainland is more than Beijing; that ungainly monstrosity we call the European Union is more than Berlin or Brussels; that cauldron of luxury, misery and inhuman fanaticism we call the Arabian Peninsula is so much more than Riyadh. Or even Saudi Arabia.

So that, for the record, my prejudice isn't against just American behemoths. Rather do I viscerally detest the whole politico-economic Concept of Behemoth, Goliath, Leviathan, etc, pretty much wherever I find it. Except that nowadays, for some reason, I find certain far more consistent and persuasive (and possibly dangerous?) articulations of that concept coming out of Washington, Beijing and Riyadh, than anything currently on offer from Moscow. Or (dare I say it?) even Tehran.

The result then is a prayer, not for America only, but no less for those other Three Horsemen of Self-Anointed Apocalypse listed above. Among all four of whom - USA, EU, PRC, KSA (why do they all answer so well to acronyms?) - and despite certain apparently growing collisions of mind and body, there remains I think a remarkable kinship, or at least parallelism, of spirit. But is there such a thing as a spirit of monotonization?

Mind you, I'm not saying that certain currently prevailing traditions in America, China, Europe and Arabia have NOTHING to offer the wider world. I just wish they'd stop behaving as though they themselves, and maybe each other, were about to become the only games in practically anybody's town the whole world over.

In sum (after all that I'll try to be brief), my prayer is that they'd all stop trying to forget the following 4 points, or rather facts:

1) There is more to being Western, or modern, or enlightened, or even human, than can be encompassed under any version of the word American; and there is vastly, richly more to being American than could ever be found within certain narrow but forceful ideological currents of today, that may answer to names like Neojeffersonian / Manifest Destiny / Expansionist / Exceptionalist / Interventionist.

2) There is thankfully, even now, more to being European than being German, however brilliantly; and there is far more richness to being German than can be comfortably administered under words like Berlin, or confined within umbrella concepts like Prusso-German, or Lutheran, or Liberal Protestant, or post-Christian.

3) There is more to being Asian or even East Asian than being merely Chinese; there is fascinatingly more to being Chinese than being just Mandarin; and there's a whole universe of difference between being Mandarin and being a mere - let me see now -  mercantilist technophiliac Confucio-Maoist authoritarian-cum-totalitarian.

4) There is a whole lot more to being Arab or Arabic than being Muslim; and there is immeasurably, blessedly more to being Muslim than can be either lodged or imprisoned within concepts like Wahhabi, or Salafi, or even Sunni   . . . or (gasp!) Riyadh . . . or Islamabad . . .