The Hard Way
It's easier to fight than to pray. So let's pray.
Friday, April 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
We can all remember when the Mideast was not a crisis but rather an unanswered question: How will they find peace? It was a place that in our lifetimes had not achieved amity and accord but was not always at war, at least not always in full, hot war.
But now everyone--literally everyone you read, hear, speak to--has the sense that events are accelerating toward some unknown outcome. And no one--no one--believes the outcome will be good. We are out of optimists and optimism. The scenarios floated are dire. "Watch Lebanon," says the ahead-of-the-pack Charles Krauthammer. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has 8,000 Katyusha rockets; they have already threatened to hit Haifa. If they do, Israel will answer, and not only in Lebanon but possibly in Syria, where the Hezbollah receives support. Syria would likely strike back with chemical weapons. Israel would answer unconventionally. And Armageddon is launched.
Tuesday night I bumped into a celebrated foreign-policy genius at a birthday party for a friend. He told me he thought that President Bush is doing well, has not yet made any serious mistakes. I said I agreed, and that I thought any effort that buys us time is good. By "us" I meant the world. He surprised me with his vehemence. "There is no 'land for peace,' " he said. "There is only land for time."
"This is not solvable," he added. And he had spent his life trying to solve international problems.
The Bush administration is passionately criticized from right and left. The right says he is shifting, unsure; that sending Collin Powell and calling for Israel to withdraw shows insufficient support for Israel and insufficient resolve in the face of terror. The left scores Mr. Bush for being reflexively pro-Israeli, as America always is. ABC News's daily political Internet report, "The Note," wonders if there's a method in Mr. Bush's madness. Perhaps he's crazy like a trapped fox, deliberately confusing everyone while he vamps up time and searches for options.
Mr. Bush stays in the kitchen and keeps stirring the broth, as Lee Atwater used to say. "Just keep stirring the pot, you never know what will come up." Thus Mr. Bush's statements, which haven't been so much contradictory as--well, let's say he chooses each day to emphasize a different truth. One senses the people at the White House hope they'll be able to look back on this as a strategy of creative ambiguity.
Mr. Bush criticizes Israel to buy time. He sends Mr. Powell to buy time. He criticizes Arafat to buy time. He has Ari Fleischer declare that Ariel Sharon wants peace to buy time. Why buy time? Because time is good. Because it's better than rushing hard and terrible events. Because the horse may laugh.
You remember the old English story. An angry king is about to put a disloyal servant to death. "My lord," the servant says, "give me only one year of life and I will do something amazing and unheard of. I will make your horse rear back and laugh with happiness." The king says, "That's impossible, horses don't laugh." The servant answers, "I have the power to, in only one year, teach your horse to laugh at all your jokes. And when I succeed I will ask you, if your grace will, to spare me. And if I should fail I will peacefully lay down my life."
The king ponders and agrees. Later a friend asks the servant why he made such a stupid, impossible vow. The servant said, "Well, in a year the king may die, or I may die. Or the horse may laugh."
That's what I think Mr. Bush is thinking: The horse may laugh.
You think this way only when you have no other options.
But isn't it odd that in a world full of geniuses, no one has an answer? Isn't it amazing that the whole highly sophisticated, technologically evolved, psychologically and historically astute world feels so at the mercy of this drama, so unable to help it or end it? This is the core of the world's pessimism: Everything you know of life tells you that if there are hundreds of thousands of Muslim fanatics who are shrewd, talented and capable, and if they live in the age of "obliterates," of weapons of mass destruction that can obliterate whole cities and countries, then some of them will get their hands on those weapons and slip through or over lines and borders. And everything you know of life and history tells you that Israel will not surrender; and that, as the writer Ron Rosenbaum, who normally speaks with a voice that is more cerebral than visceral, said this week in the New York Observer, "This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation--Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. . . . The unspoken corollary of the slogan 'Never again' is: 'And if again, not us alone.' "
Those are the emotions coming from both sides, aimed at and springing from the Mideast, which a Catholic writer has called the vortex, the portal through which God has talked to man since the very dawn of history. The Garden of Eden, Moses, the Ten Commandments, the prophets, the birth of Christ the Redeemer, the crucifixion, the fall of the temple, the return of Israel. The Mideast is the place where God talks to us.
And where these days his message does not seem ambiguous. It's this: You're all in a heap of trouble.
So what are we to do? I was daydreaming about all this as I walked in my neighborhood on Pierpont Street yesterday, and I found myself staring at a message someone had drawn onto newly poured concrete: "Smile. Today is what you have." It struck me, naturally, as sentimental street art. And then I thought no, it's both spiritual--"This is the day the Lord made/ let us rejoice and be glad in it," wrote the Psalmist--and fatalistic.
It made me think of Mother Teresa and the Catholic writer Henri Nouwen, who was a priest. He went to her once and poured out his problems--he wasn't appreciated, he was misunderstood, higher-ups weren't helping him in his good work. "You wouldn't be having these problems if you prayed more," she said. And that's all she said. At first Nouwen felt resentful--he had expected encouragement, sympathy, solidarity. Instead he got a blunt statement that he knew, in a moment, was true. He really wouldn't be having these problems if he prayed more. So he went home and prayed. And the problems became manageable, and life did not end.
Which got me thinking this: It is easier to fight than to pray. In fact it's much easier to fight than to pray. It's one of the reasons we do more of the former than the latter.
And fighting is hard. But it's not the hardest thing of all the things we could do. The hardest thing is this: I have been reading about Karol Wojtilwa during World War II, long before he became Pope John Paul II. Mr. Wojtilwa was in his late teens when the war started, and after the Nazis invaded Poland he worked manual labor, on the freezing overnight shift at a factory, outdoors, breaking and carrying rocks. He was ill fed, grew thin, suffered. He had only one pair of shoes, and they were wooden. What energy he had after work he gave to art, to help keep Polish drama alive, for he felt that art would help his nation live. He was unusually generous with others, shared what he had, was known for a particular kindness. He helped friends in the Resistance, but he did not join them. Why? Because, as he told a friend, the only resistance that would work was asking God's help. "The only thing that will be effective is prayer." So he quietly and constantly prayed, for the liberation of Poland and the end of Nazism and the safety of his jailed and abused Jewish and Christian friends.
Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best answer but the only one.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her new book, "When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan," is just out from Viking Penguin. You can buy it here at the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays.
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