Trudy Rubin Shines Light on Zelensky/Trump Meeting

Trudy Rubin’s article “Trump and Vance Shame Themselves in Attack.” recounts the animus that Trump feels toward Zelensky going back to Trump’s pressuring Zelensky to investigate Biden. (Inquirer March 1) Trump refused to allow the United Nations’ motion indicating that Putin was the aggressor in the war on Ukraine calling Zelensky a dictator who started the war. Trudy Rubin is one of the world’s leading experts on the Middle East, Ukraine and far right politics. She recently returned from Germany where the far right Afn Party which downplays the Nazi crimes was elected. She is one of my heroes. She knew Navalny and others now making history and has a historic view of the predatory nature of Putin and Russia. Vicki and I will have dinner with her on Wednesday night.

How proud we all should be of how Zelensky stood tall in telling truth to power.

This past Sunday the designated scripture in the Episcopal Church included the passage proclaimed by Jesus to “Love Your Enemies.” (Matthew 5:44). This includes those that persecute you. Loving your enemies is a declaration that is found only in Christian literature. No other religion has this as a mandate. The speaker this past Sunday in church indicated that the only way to accomplish this hard command is through prayer. Here are my thoughts on prayer at this moment.

When prayer recently has been offered up as an answer to challenging situations, the response that we hear is send “thoughts and prayers.” The phrase was used so often that it lost its meaning particularly after various school shootings. Gun laws were needed. Even Michelle Obama changed her tune when confronted with the possibility of Trump winning reelection. She went from “When they go low, we go high.” to simply, “Tonight there is no going high. She accused Trump of going small.”

I think that we can make this command to love your enemies more real when seeing Trump and Vance in action belittling a hero. I reflected on this troubling command and how to make prayer more real than “thoughts and prayers” which has lost its meaning in our troubling times. I thought of people and how they handled the response to injustice in past times. We first need to underscore the importance of traditional prayer through our own places of worship. I don’t have any enemies in the world in which I live, but I do have people who don’t like me. You don’t do what I did in life and take hard stands to help others and not have that be the case.

The first person I thought of was Dr. Clague who was a visiting professor from either Oxford or Cambridge (I can’t remember which university) to Yale whose expertise was prayer. At Yale we studied all kinds of prayer. The basic tenet of the course was “prayer is action. Prayer is active not passive.” Private and public prayer are crucial. When our backs are against the wall, we immediately go to address God directly in a desire to contact God for a request or support as well as when we join collectively in public corporate prayer in our various worship communities.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King who was influenced by Ghandi demonstrated the importance of prayer connected to action. It was the very definition of his life. It was Ghandi who said, “The Lord himself wouldn’t stand in front of a starving child except in the form of food.” King’s ministry of civil rights was through the action of protests and his encouragement of exercising love for others by turning the other the other cheek. His interpretation of prayer resonates with that World War One command, “Praise the lord, but pass the ammunition.”

The focus of Friday’s explosive meeting was on who was the enemy in the Ukrainian nightmare. For me and many others, it is Putin. By extension, he is my enemy. But the Lord has told me that I must love him. How? I will privately pray for Putin and Trump or participate in corporate prayer for them. But I got a lesson from Clague, King, and many others that prayer is action. In the words of the of the prophet Micah, “He has shown you, O Mortal, what is required of you. To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8) Trump is a bully who qualifies as such because he brought a posse to the meeting with Zelensky. Vance’s comment turned the meeting into an explosive encounter. Zelensky took the bait. There was Zelensky sitting there like Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena.” Roosevelt’s words could be a prayer of praise to God that such a man exists as Zelensky who sat amid people supporting his enemy. Yes, a prayer celebrating courage and action reminding us of the Lord himself who loved his enemies, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Justice, mercy, and humility are the actions of a prayer that is needed very much now in public and in private. I have always been moved by Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena.”

“It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

What a model for us all!!!!  We know “Love Your Enemies” when we look at Rubin and Zelensky and their work on behalf of justice. Make no mistake about it. Love and justice are the two pillars that hold up the table of ethics. Ethics tells us that one always defines the other.

What a model for us all!!!!  We know “Love Your Enemies” when we look at Rubin and Zelensky and their work on behalf of justice. Make no mistake about it. Love and justice are the two pillars that hold up the table of ethics. Ethics tells us that one always defines the other.