PRAYER AND DUNKIRK By CANON F. R. BARRY, D.S.O.
HE Day of Prayer which thronged all our churches was T followed within a very few hours by the news of the Belgian surrender and the worst tidings we have heard for centuries. Cynics were quick to take the opportunity of saying That shows how much good it was. Then came the epic of Dunkirk, and deliverance beyond all expectation, with the retort that the prayer had been answered and official requests for a Day of Thanksgiving. Since then, despite the prayers of the Pope and of all men and women of goodwill, Mussolini has struck in the back of wounded France and the Allied cause is in still graver jeopardy. If before these lines appear in print the Allies win a success in the Mediterranean, shall we claim that that vindicates our praying? We must treat the question with the utmost seriousness. There is no doubt that a great many people are in deep bewilderment and distress ; and what is at stake is something far more than the immediate and local problem: it is in the end the whole possibility of faith in a living God at work in history. - If God is but an impersonal Absolute aloof from the strain and conflict of this world, Olympian in a heaven " above the battle," then the question does not arise. If He is the " immanent will " of The Dynasts, equally present in all events that happen, and blind to the difference between good and evil—if the historical is indeed the real so that whatever turns out is of God—then it is meaning- less to speak of prayer with any idea that it will or can be " answered."
But such is not the God Christians worship. Christianity has inherited from Judaism the conviction that God is the Lord of History, that He is at work in the events of time, guiding history to a divine purpose—the fulfilment of the King- dom of God and righteousness. It is sure that He is a per- sonal and " living " God, whose hand is outstretched to act and intervene—for a living God must be one who " does things "- to whom individuals are precious (" the very hairs of your head are all numbered ") and to whom no true prayer is made in vain. The teaching of Christ, indeed, seems almost naive to the sophisticated modern mind in its serene and untroubled certainty that the Father hears the prayers of His children. Is such a faith tenable today? For the question of prayer is, as I said, bound up with the ultimate question of belief in God in any sense in which belief matters. If it is urgent upon us at this moment, it is equally raised by the whole course of history.
Nobody but a very shallow fool will think there is any glib ad hoc answer. " In matters of religion," as Whitehead said, " simple solutions are bogus solutions." It has to be recognised that the course of history does not provide a moral for a Sunday school. Any honest religion, as it seems to me, must acknow- ledge round its central certainties wide margins of confessed agnosticism. We know in part and we prophesy in part. Yet there are some things which can be said. The first is this. Christian faith in God is not created and cannot be sustained by the keeping of a profit-and-loss account. The idea that we can use Him for our purposes is the very negation of religion. We are back in the primitive atmosphere of magic if we regard a national day of prayer as an attempt to procure what we want— as though by a long and strong pull all together we could get the goods delivered from the slot. What we were really doing was not that. We were offering ourselves and our cause to His will, so that through us He may work His work, may use us as the servants of His purpose and enable us to overcome the evil. Who dare say that that prayer is not answered in the reborn soul of faith and consecration with which our people have stood firm under the strain, in the inconceivable valour and endurance which have made Dunkirk immortal while the world lasts? There was the breaking in of a new factor from a dimension unknown to the Nazis to change and redeem the total situation.
Yet this alone does not take us far enough. If the Christian religion is not a complete mistake we are bound to believe that it is the will of God that Justice and Truth, Freedom and Corn- passion should not be overwhelmed by the forces of barbaristr, cruelty and terror. A living God, as Lord Balfour said, " take; sides." However unworthy we may rightly think ourselves to be used as instruments of God's purpose—and that is a very dangerous belief—yet we are upheld by the conviction tha t this war in which we are engaged runs back (as it were) into the eternal order, into the conflict between right and wrong, the cause of Christ and the Prince of this world. If a righteous God is sovereign in history, then the " evil things " against which we contend are already under sentence of death. But the righteous cause does not always win. Jerusalem was again and again destroyed. The Barbarians overwhelmed the Christian Empire—and how frightful a challenge to faith in God was that. Yet Christian faith in God was born in tragedy: Out of the heart of such defeat and failure as seemed the utter and final disproof of it, out of the Crucifixion of Jesus by the powers of evil and real politics it was transfigured into life and glory.
Our faith stands not on any arguments but on Christ's Cross and Resurrection as the victory that overcomes the world. " It is not history that makes faith in God: it is faith in God that makes history." That is what the aggressors have forgotten. Christian civilisation is not finished. Whatever may be the suffering and loss and tribulation which we may have to brave, God is the redeemer of the world and the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God who is not overcome by evil, who reveals Himself to us in a hero's Cross ; and He will bring the better resurrection. What is required of us is to be faithful, to defend the right as He gives us to see it, and through life or death to trust in Him.
• There is one word more that must be added. What volume of prayer rises night and day from mothers and wives for the safety of their men? And if they are not " answered "—what then? The God to whom persons are dear is not the God of the dead but of the living. Faith in God that is bounded by this world of sin and death just does not make sense. If we would be sustained by Christian faith, then it must be complete Christianity. In the evil day nothing less will stand.
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