Bonjour, America: in less than 24 hours, the rhetoric about Paris has become divisive. I can’t say I’m surprised. When I went to bed seeing #prayforparis becoming so popular, I felt uneasy about the implications, but I also realized that I was overthinking it.
This morning, while some encourage us to pray for Paris, others rebuke those prayers, pointing their fingers at religion as the cause of the violence.
While religion has a long history of violence, and monotheistic religion particularly, these attacks that have been carried out all over in the name of religion are the violence of disenfranchisement, wrapped with the flag of religion in the ignorant hopes that it will somehow be validated by the religion instead of invalidating the religion it claims to serve. I wish people could see through that.
I also wish people could see that, for some, to “pray” means to ponder with deep intent the healing that must take place for Paris to move forward, and hoping that somehow those intentions reach their destination to find Parisians of all faiths with the strength and determination needed to repair what has been destroyed there, physically, psychologically and spiritually.
It’s superstitious, yes, but what else can any of us actually do? Paris isn’t Haiti. It has water, food, and shelter. Paris’s wound is a psychic wound, and for a city that is so cosmopolitan, so tolerant, so welcoming, and so rich with culture that it has itself become a symbol of international travel around the World, the idea that anybody would want to hurt such a beloved city is unfathomable.
It speaks to a deep illness in humanity. It is the illness of how we see the other. The other is guilty, and must be evangelized, reprimanded, scorned, or punished. It is not religion that causes this kind of violence, it is otherness. It is the same otherness that causes all ideological, racial, and ecumenical rancor the World over: a rancor that under the right conditions ferments into hate, and sponsors the kind of violence that we are all so vehemently against.
So pray if you like, but realize that your calls for others to pray, or to avoid praying, might be seen as a moral high ground to which they ought aspire, and to which you have no rightful claim.