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Good morning. The call for a nation to pray together has a long history. As historian Dr Natalie Mears and other colleagues here at Durham have detailed, it goes back to the tenth century when King Aethelred ordered prayers for God’s help to withstand a Danish invasion. So in issuing a call to daily prayer to reflect on the enormity of the pandemic, beginning tonight at 6pm, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are following tradition. Up to the end of the second World War there were over 500 national days of prayer called by monarchs, governments and Archbishops. Their purpose was to seek God’s help or to give thanks in times of war, uncertainty and outbreaks of disease. Winston Churchill supported the idea, but there was often significant opposition expressed in pamphlets and satirical cartoons and even some clergy avoided the occasions. Queen Victoria didn’t see the point of a national call to petitionary prayer and doubted that ‘the Almighty would alter the course of his providence at the request of the Privy Council’. Another Victorian who struggled with the concept of prayer was Charles Darwin. In 1851, his daughter Annie died at the age of ten despite her father’s desperate search for effective medical treatment and fervent prayer. It was this experience of unanswered prayer that was one of the key factors in moving Darwin away from Christian faith. For those who have faith, prayer has many such struggles and mysteries, not least during a pandemic. If God is good and takes seriously our prayers then why are my prayers not answered – for healing the people that I love and for the world to be a better place? Others may say with Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, ‘The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays’. Yet in my own Christian faith, prayer despite its difficulties continues to be something more, a sense that in some way prayer changes things. Perhaps it is because I see in the death and resurrection of Jesus that death does not have the last word, and that God does act in this world. So tonight I will pause for prayer, alongside my usual evening of watching the grim reality of the news and then the escapist comedy of The Simpsons. And for those who don’t like the language of prayer, the Archbishops’ call can be seen as nightly ritual to remember lost loved ones, to be thankful for key workers, and to focus on our responsibilities in helping to protect others. Not a bad thing to do, in between considering the news and finding things to distract our minds from it.