The War Prayer

In some respects, the stranger’s presence seems otherworldly. He is given no backstory and appears without warning. The fact he is referred to as the stranger suggests no one in the community knows him. He moves to the front of the church, the narrator says, “with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle” (Paragraph 4), and his eyes burn with “an uncanny light” (Paragraph 5). He could be viewed as an angel or some other supernatural entity, thus increasing the significance of his words.

If the stranger is human and not supernatural, he might be viewed as a prophet. The narrator’s description of the stranger recalls images of Old Testament prophets: “his long body clothed in a robe […] his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders” (Paragraph 4). In this reading, even if the stranger is not divine, he speaks for God. The prophets of the Old Testament often decried the iniquities and moral failings they found in the ancient Israelites. The stranger seems to render the same kind of judgment against the church’s members—identifying their hypocrisy and lack of moral imagination. The judgment is even more severe because the religious ceremony is nominally Christian.