Praying for Peace
Posted on by Malinda Collier
A friend gave me this ornament last year. I told her then that it was perfect as I begin my nightly prayers praying for peace.
It is ever more perfect this year.
I am praying for peace in this war-torn and war-weary world.
I pray for the Ukraine - that the Russians pack up their missiles and bombs and drive their tanks home. I pray that healing can begin, that the things which can be rebuilt will be, and those forever lost - mourned. I pray that the Ukraine will once again bloom with sunflowers.
I pray for Israel and Gaza - that somehow they will be released from their generations-old cycle of vengeance and violence. I am not naive - I know this is a complex history and much harm has been done on both sides, by both sides. But I pray that somehow they can come to see what they share rather than what separates them. Abraham, father of all the monotheistic religions is patriarch to both Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians. Could we begin there? Could we imagine a Palestine and an Israel seeing each other as images of one another, of God, rather than as enemies to be brutalized and killed?
More often than not I think it will be the women, the mothers who will forge the first links in the chain of peace. Just as in Northern Ireland during the Troubles it was the mothers who cried out - saying they were tired of burying their sons, (one Catholic and one Protestant who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Peace).
I pray and have hope that it will be Jewish and Muslim and Christian women, the mothers who will say enough.
Peace seems to me so much more challenging and difficult than war.
We have to work hard to create a different outcome, one that can look ahead not forgetting the violence, destruction, and devastation but one that recognizes that nothing changes until we change.
By now it is getting late. I have prayed for all of you, most by name.
And my prayer refrain is always to pray for the peace which passes all understanding, a kingdom peace that while only God can give, is ours to claim and manifest.
The kingdom is here and it is now. Peace is ours to build.
I pray for peace within myself.
Malinda