God on our Side

It occurred to me today that both Mark Twain, in his A War Prayer, and Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, address our tendency to think our point of view and that of God Almighty closely coincide -- particularly when we are ourselve s feeling highly partisan vis-a-vis some other party, and most particularly when we are at war.

Twain's approach is ironic, of course, and he makes his point by showing us that while praying for blessings for ourselves, we are implicitly bringing curses down on the heads of our opponents -- while Lincoln, more dispassionately (thought with a dig at his own opponents nonetheless), points out that both sides are presumably praying to the same God for victory, and that God can hardly grant that same blessing to both sides.

On the surface the two points are very different: blessing implies curse in Twain, and prayer matches prayer in Lincoln. Today, howover, I see them as two sides of the same coin, two expressions of the one insight.

As Lincoln himself is supposed to have said on another occasion, the issue may not be whether God is on our side, so much as whether we are on God's side. Which, ahem, may transcend sides altogether.