麻豆社

Good morning. All over Europe, and in much of the rest of the world, people are praying for Ukraine. I recognise of course that there are many for whom prayer is a useless fantasy, and I can certainly understand their difficulties, but the number of people who pray is in fact far higher than those who go to church, mosque, gurdwara, temple or synagogue.

So, those of us who do pray, how should we pray at a time like this?

One of my heroes is the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose writings were such a major influence on top American academics and politicians, especially President Jimmy Carter and President Barack Obama. I find the prayers he composed in World War II a good guide.

They begin with a sense of solidarity and sorrow for everyone caught up in the conflict.

We pray this day mindful of the sorry confusion of our world. Look with mercy on your children so steeped in misery of their own contriving.

Then of course he prayed for 鈥淭he victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage鈥�, as he put it. But obeying what Jesus taught, he also prayed for the enemy, yet not as though they were totally dissimilar to ourselves.

We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own heart is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.

Then finally, we pray for ourselves, he said,

That we who live in peace and quietness may not regard our good fortune as proof of our virtue, or rest content to have our ease at the price of other men鈥檚 sorrow and tribulation.

This is a form of prayer that binds us to all those caught up in the conflict and resists every kind of self-righteousness and complacency.

The great French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal once said 鈥淛esus is in agony until the end of time鈥�. For Christians the agony he shares is in Ukraine. And that鈥檚 why the simplest prayer is perhaps the best of all. Orthodox Christians in both Russia and Ukraine, divided as they are, will both be praying in solidarity with that agony using the Jesus prayer, one which has become much valued and used in the West in recent years. My simple version variant goes: 鈥淟ord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have pity on us.鈥�

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