War bonds: how can we just go about our normal lives and practice our faith in a time of war?

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I ATTENDED A LECTURE AT THE Boston Carmelite monastery on the Carmelite martyrs of World War II. When the speaker opened the discussion, a woman, who had been a child in the 1940s, commented that it was not until that day that she had thought to wonder how people conducted normal religious and sacra mental lives during the horrors of war.

Lately I have been thinking about that woman and her observation and about the countless civilians and combatants during World War II who felt impotent to change an evil reality that seemed to possess a relentless, inexorable logic.

In this third year of the war in Iraq I am haunted by the normalcy of my daily life, with its routines of religious observance, friendship, work, and recreation. How can I live a normal life in a time of war? How can I attend daily Mass and receive Communion? How can I confess my sins and receive absolution? Intercessory prayer and focused charitable giving no longer seem an adequate response to the horror of this war.

I measure my present silence against my opposition to the Vietnam War. Back then I was living in community in Washington, D.C., young and unencumbered enough to participate in the whole panoply of opposition to war: rallies and civil disobedience, support for conscientious objectors, educational efforts, and assistance to the victims of the war.

The language of morality I flaunted then filters back to haunt me now: "Don't be a good German," "Not in my name," "Not with my money." I cannot escape the fact, though, that this war is being fought in my name and with my money.

During the Vietnam War the late Father Richard McSorley accepted what seemed at the time a small sacrifice. A peace educator and civil rights and anti-nuclear activist, McSorley quietly gave up alcohol during the years his brother Jesuit, Daniel Berrigan, was imprisoned for his acts of resistance to the war. For McSorley this was not a meaningless sacrifice but an act of solidarity and an added mortification to an already ascetic and self-sacrificing life.

McSorley's example opened the door for me to the church's traditional spiritual weapons against war: the corporal works of mercy, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, mortification, and penance.

"An act of love," Dorothy Day wrote, "a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all."

I've explored this tradition primarily through the writings of Day, Maisie Ward, and Caryll Houselander, three laywomen who, despite different attitudes toward pacifism, shared the understanding that war is the consequence of sin. War is the concentrated manifestation of greed, idolatry, and pride forged into a crucifying instrument that is inflicted on the poor and suffering, the "least of these" whom we are to serve. These three women share a cross-centered spirituality that flows naturally from an emphasis on the church as the Mystical Body of Christ--theological notes that are less prominent today.

Mystical Body theology stresses the unity of all people through an identification with Christ and participation in his suffering and a supernatural charity. All people are of equal value because all souls have been redeemed by one sacrifice of infinite value. This is a powerful rebuke to the logic of the world, with its insistence on the primacy of nationalistic ideologies, tribal and ethnic loyalties, and self-righteousness that allows us to brutalize others.

"THE MOST EFFECTIVE ACTION WE CAN TAKE," DAY insisted, is to try to conform our lives to the folly of the cross." Everything in us recoils from the cross, but Christ's cry of trust and forgiveness and utter self-emptying is the only antidote to violence and terrorism.

And the most effective way to conform our lives to his is through our active participation at Mass so that, in the soil of faith, the Holy Spirit can form us into instruments of his peace.

If this is so, as I believe it is, then I hope that, in the midst of another war, the woman who spoke at Carmel has been comforted to learn that, despite the unspeakable horrors of World War II, the normal religious and sacramental life of the church was not a scandal but may in some small way have kept further evil and violence at bay.

RACHELLE LINNER, a librarian and writer who lives in Boston.