Protest as Prayer

Interceding in a hot mess

‘Are you here for private prayer or as a visitor?’ asks the Wells Cathedral receptionist. She’s blinking furiously.

‘Uhm’.

I have the kids with me. Nothing about my prayer life feels very private these days.

‘Prayer, I guess.’

‘Ok. Great. It’s £15 if you just want to visit.’

We walk in. Toby immediately starts to scream, delighted by the acoustics.

‘Who lives here?’ asks Etty.

It’s a good question.

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Last week you might have seen the photos of an 84-year-old priest, Rev. Sue Parfitt, being arrested for holding a sign which said ‘I oppose genocide – I support Palestine Action’. She was sat with twenty seven others by a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, another person who employed civil disobedience as a political strategy in his own time.

Sue, of course, was deliberately testing the boundaries of the law in Britain, where it is now illegal to express support for Palestine Action, a direct action group who recently sprayed red paint on Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. According to Palestine Action, flights leave daily from this location to ‘RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, a base used for military operations in Gaza and across the Middle East.’

Sue is the grande dame of the non-violent protest circuit in the UK. If you google her you’ll see that she’s been arrested on dozens of occasions. She was ordained in 1994 and was part of the first cohort of female priests. Most of her activism is climate related, but I have not been remotely surprised to see her arrested for her stance on Palestine. ‘I know that we are in the right place doing the right thing’ Parfitt told Novara media during her protest ‘we cannot be bystanders’

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It’s 2011. I’m nineteen and sat in a humid conference centre in Columbo, Sri Lanka.

The air conditioning is struggling to accommodate the large space, so several fans are brought in by staff, but they only seem to move the clammy air around the white-walled room. Aside from Lynne, the British woman who is accompanying me from The Methodist Church, I’m the only other white person attending this conference.

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In truth, I cannot remember much about this trip to Sri Lanka. It came about under strange circumstances: the young woman who was supposed to attend from the UK had to drop out. I’d been called up about three weeks prior to see if I could stand in. ‘Sure’ I said, with the confidence of a teenager who’d just finished her A-Levels and knew nothing about the global south.

One presentation does stand out in my mind though. In one of the plenaries, an older delegate stood up and proceeded to give a detailed explanation of ‘R2P’ – or Responsibility to Protect, an international human rights norm, adopted internationally in 2005 and designed to prevent mass atrocities like genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes from taking place.

In essence, R2P stipulates that states have a responsibility to protect their populations from mass atrocities, like the ones that the international community had failed to prevent in the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda. The primary responsibility to protect a people lies with the affected State itself. But a ‘residual responsibility’ also lies with the wider community of states if a country is either unable or unwilling to fulfil it’s responsibility toward it’s citizens. This might look like the imposition of sanctions, and in the most severe of cases, could entail a full scale ‘humanitarian intervention’. I don’t need to tell you that there is zero appetite for the latter option these days, and arguably for good reason.

I’ve been thinking about R2P in relation to Gaza recently. The notion that a wider community of states would recognise their responsibility to protect Palestinians feels like a naive fantasy. Realism now reigns supreme in international politics – there’s no room for the bleeding heart liberalism of the new millenium.

This leads me to wonder: If all states fail to protect citizens and prevent a genocide, what is my responsibility to that state, to our state in the UK?

‘Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?’ asked Henry David Thoreau in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. He also wrote that ‘Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?’

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I had a conversation with a friend last week who expressed her reservations about the motivations of protestors. It all seemed a bit self-centered and righteous, she argued. I understand where she is coming from, but as someone who has grown up within a tradition of non-violent civil disobedience I tried to articulate that for many people of faith, protest is an act of prayer. The etymological roots of ‘intercession’ emerged in the 15^th century, and mean ‘a pleading on behalf of oneself or another’. When we protest we are often doing so on behalf of another group or a people we have never met. In this sense it’s a physical act of intercessory prayer. Understanding intercession is key to understanding why Sue Parfitt did what she did. (She is not, as some might surmise, mad.)

Sue Parfitt puts our government to shame. Rightfully so. To proscribe Palestine Action is a cynical act of judicial overreach which will stain the reputation of Labour for decades to come. I am now of the view that as citizens witnessing a gross failure of the state, we too have a responsibility to protect our global citizens. This might look like protest. It might look like meeting with your MP. Perhaps it means raising children in the ways of peace and reconciliation. I’m afraid it does not involve staying silent on the question of genocide in Gaza.

There is a cognitive dissonance at work within our political system which must be shattered. To witness Labour return to government and commit itself not just to supporting Israel—but repeatedly enabling its war crimes—takes my breath away on a daily basis.

I believe there will be a day of reckoning and justice for all those politicians who have failed and enabled a genocide to unfold. It will come too late, but it will happen.

I also believe that Palestine will be free. I feel it in my soul. I hope you can too.

‘And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind or the sound of the voice praying.’ T.S Eliot

Recommendation Corner:

• Please support Evan Wroe, part of our Murmuration community, as he does his big swim to raise money for Gaza Soup Kitchen and We Are Not Numbers. Give generously!! And good luck Ev!

• I’ve been listening to ‘Devotion’ by Hot Chip these past couple of days.

• An excoriating Ronan Bennett on his support for Palestine Action in Profile Magazine. (Worth reading in full)

  ‘When the alleged painters go on trial they may want to call on the services of a well-known human rights barrister who 20 years ago, in a separate case, defended Josh Richards. Along with others, Richards had infiltrated RAF Fairford intending to disable bombers heading to Iraq. The barrister and his colleagues argued that their clients’ actions were aimed at preventing illegal war or war crimes and therefore could be legally justified. Two juries refused to convict Richards, and the charges were eventually withdrawn.

  This able and persuasive human rights barrister now has a different day job. He is, of course, Keir Starmer, the prime minister who, for reasons as yet unexplained, but perhaps guessable (ambition, opportunism, lack of principle, moral turpitude, general spinelessness and an unfailing commitment to convicted felon, self-confessed sexual abuser, nest-featherer-in-chief and aspiring autocrat Donald Trump), has travelled a long and dark way from fighting the corner of idealistic protesters who risk their liberty, their futures and sometimes their lives to shine a light on the glaring injustices they see around them.’

Thank you for reading. My name is Grace Pengelly, and I’m a writer and literary book editor based in Somerset. If you enjoy these newsletters, then do consider upgrading to a paid membership. My small cohort of paid subscribers chip in £3 a month and it affords me the time I need to work on it each week.