Don't Pray for Ukraine

[kimberlysteele]

Prayer has been unfashionable among Davos wannabes and TED Talk hipsters until recently. Memes about the uselessness of prayer used to dominate Facebook along with legions of angry atheists always at the ready to chime in on comment sections of bereaved parents or videos of natural disasters, laughing at the faithful while likely crying inside. Something changed because Facebook/Twitter/Youtube (which will be referred to from now on as Twitboob) started including "Pray for Ukraine" with its buffet of multicolored virtue banners such as "Marked Safe from Whatever Hideous Tragedy Occurred This Week" and "I Got My Covid Vaccine".

Prayer isn't always good. Prayer is non-physical communication between a human and another entity. Usually this prayer is mental but there are some who choose to conjure up the entity they are praying to by force, which is kind of like when an obnoxious drunk friend wants to talk at 3 in the morning, but instead of just calling you, they parachute onto your lawn, break into your house, hog tie you, and drag you back to their basement in order to talk to you. Some prayer is good and some prayer is bad. Some entities are good and some entities are bad. When I was a kid, I confused praying to Santa Claus with praying to Jesus and once I prayed to both in the same night. Anyone can be prayed to. People can pray to Kimberly Steele -- I sincerely hope they don't, but they can. There are several Etsy vendors who make celebrity novena candles. In an episode of Orange is the New Black, two characters fervently pray to Beyoncé. It is my opinion that the MRNA vaccines of various stripe open a direct channel to certain demons of the Goetia, and that is why so many of the vaxxed end up with possession-like symptoms such as tremors and projectile vomiting. To make a long story short, not all prayer is good or consensual, and when prayer is directed at a non-human entity, it is very easy for it to become rude. It is also very easy to pray to a demon when you think you're praying to an angel, or to be praying to a minor spirit when you think you or praying to a god, or to be speaking with a nasty trickster spirit instead of your dead father through a medium or Ouija board.

Backward Christian Soldiers

Christians often pray as a form of war. Their God is often mistaken for a cosmic vending machine as well as a vengeful punisher who inflicts pain like a mafia boss. The sort of Christian who prays for the punishment of others (often in secret but sometimes right in the open) imagines himself and his team as Right and all others as Wrong. Bible literalists take a statement like "preach unto all nations" as a direct imperative to force-infect the rest of humanity with the Yahweh-virus at all costs.

Songwriter Happy Rhodes has a song called "Save Our Souls" that captures it perfectly:

We think that we're superior
To every living thing
It can be lonely at the top
So we look for higher praise to sing
Won't you just say hello
We'll give you a cable show
We have weapons to intimidate
You if you look afright
Come on down and see our
Zoos and refugee camps
Ain't it worth your time

Pity our emptiness

The Gentleman Preacher

A few weeks ago a Christian pastor from a church down the block showed up at our doorstep. I wasn't home. My agnostic/atheist husband was home and he got into a short conversation with the gentleman preacher, who actually asked permission to pray for my husband. My husband said "No thank you", however, he was very moved by the man asking for his consent instead of blanket presuming and steamrolling on through. If more Christians start acting like the Gentleman Preacher of Kimberly's Neighborhood, churches will start filling to the brim and doing the good works of Jesus. I am not holding my breath for that to happen.

Non-Christians and various stripes of Twitboobers have turned to prayer because it has been revealed as a blunt battle axe that can be swung around in the china shops of social media. That is to say prayer can be weaponized as nasty Christians realized long ago. Twitboob has only recently caught on, hence Pray for Ukraine. They espouse Praying for Ukraine because it is the Latest Thing. They want carte blanche to jam the Latest Thing down collective throats with constant reassurance from experts (kind of like a Girlfriend Experience) that they are strong and wonderful. They don't care if the reassurance is fake.

Europeans are in a real pickle right now as they face the prospect of mammoth utility bills this winter while having to get scrappy when it comes to food. I think middle class Americans are more used to scrounging and seeing red rectangles on our late and unpaid utility bills. We already were deplorable Walmart, GoodWill, and Aldi shoppers back in the Obama era. Being demi-poor like me isn't so bad but you do have to get used to it. Going demi-poor or straight up poor is hard to do overnight and the higher they sit, the harder they fall. I don't give a rat's behind about my gym membership, my cable subscription, my Adobe software suite, my hundred dollar restaurant meals, my underground parking, or my museum patronage because I don't have any of those things.

There is a teeming class of people who are not ready for what they gleefully signed up for in 2020. Neither can they handle the responsibility for what they've done to Western civilization in general nor can they cope with the physical demands of poverty after quaxxing themselves and their children. The shots are in the process of establishing an underclass of handicapped, dependent, and mostly infertile adults whose families face bankruptcy or homelessness because of repeated trips to ERs and medical clinics for the rest of their lives. When they land in those ERs and clinics, they will be gaslighted that it couldn't possibly be the MRNA vaccines. Throwing money at the Ukraine is yet another mask to hide the emerging truth of what they have done to themselves and everyone else. Feel-good, "We're All in This Together" rhetoric is a favorite shield for karma-avoiders.

Pray for Ukraine is a veiled ask to support the US's current proxy war with Russia. It took me way too long in my life to understand how leaders of countries quibble for resources and dress up their resource grabs with a thick frosting of ideology. Don't pray for Ukraine. Pray for yourself and for those whom you've asked their express permission to pray for. Pray to the spirit of the land where you are and give thanks compulsively. Pray to the real gods and don't broadcast your private conversations with them; we wouldn't understand anyway.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well said, Kimberly! I can understand Methylethyl's side of the story too, though -- I think it is fair to pray for the safety of a particular loved one. I think it's also fair to pray that the highest good be done for all parties involved, because that approach has the humility to realize that maybe you don't know what the highest good is.

I think there is a clear difference between what methylethyl is describing and prayer as bullying.

What prayer as bullying looks like in a domestic context: My mom and her friend have a lot of loud conversations on speakerphone, and a frequent topic of conversation is their adult children and grandchildren. I often overhear prayers that this or that child or grandchild will repent of having the wrong vaccination status, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong profession, the wrong religion, and on and on.

My mom and her friend are both opposed to the COVID vaccines, and I am unvaccinated, so I don't get prayed for on that count. However, I get prayed for on some of the other counts. I know I am the topic of prayers of disappointment, and it hurts. Like any unvaccinated person, I made some social and professional sacrifices on account of that; my primary motivation for being unvaccinated, at least early on, was not wanting to send my mother into an emotional meltdown, and the thanks I get for backing her up on that is getting crapped all over by her and her friend regarding every other part of my life.

I never overhear prayers along the lines of, "Thank you, God, for giving us all these children and grandchildren who are a blessing just the way they are."

Angry Oregonian

[methylethyl]

One thinks of the tale of the Publican and the Pharisee!

[mr_nobody1967]

Wow, your mother and her friend really sound like a special kind of passive-aggressive!

[kimberlysteele]

Totally what I was thinking! Methylethyl's reference to the Publican and the Pharisee is spot on as usual, though I have come to expect nothing less from her!

[(Anonymous)]

Haha yeah, don't even get those two started on the potential for passive-aggressive wackiness involving thank-you notes, either.

All of this does bring up a question I have had since becoming aware of the JMG forum and associated acts about a year ago, though. I am from a Protestant background, am now mostly in the spiritual but not religious category, and had never heard of the practice of asking people's permission to pray for them before I saw it done on the JMG forum. Is this specifically any sort of Pagan doctrine, or is it simply a human courtesy to humans who have been burned by prayer chains turned gossipy and the like?

The latter makes sense to me because I think we as humans have pretty much the same problems whether we call ourselves Christian or Pagan or anything else, and I can imagine someone who was on the receiving end of praybullying finally flipping out and going to the absolute opposite extreme of saying you MUST ask for consent for every little thing. Whatever anyone's label, that's understandable! I'd be curious to know the official story, though.

Angry Oregonian

[kimberlysteele]

Of course I could be wrong, but I think it's the second one, the "humans who have been burned by prayer chains". And I agree, asking consent for every little thing is just as bad in a different way. At some point, I'll be writing an essay about the key differences between a wish and a prayer. I think it might clear up some confusion (for me as well as others) if I can delve into the subject a bit.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Angry,

Just a data point -- my ex-wife was Wiccan, and the first time I ever heard the idea that you shouldn't pray for someone without their permission was from her High Priestess. (My own family covered the spectrum from Atheist to It's-polite-if-we-call-ourselves-Protestant-so-long-as-you-don't-actually-ask-us-to-believe-anything, so I never got any training about prayer at home.)

Hosea Tanatu