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Dear saints,
Each week we pray for parts of the world riven by conflict. There are so many. We name two, because they are so much in the news and filled with heartbreak: Israel-Gaza and Ukraine. We could so easily name other places, like the Democratic Republic of Congo that since the 1990s has seen an utterly staggering six million people killed in the decades of conflict that have ravaged that country. It is the twelfth most deadly war in history yet often forgotten.
This past week Ukranian parents and medical staff saw the main children's hospital in Kyiv bombed. At the same time, the Anglican Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was forcibly closed by the Israel Defense Forces, a blow to the desperately traumatized civilian population there and condemned by Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
We pray for Israel-Gaza and Ukraine for so many reasons. To lament the worst we will do to one another. To cry out to God for the end to such utterly brutal conflict. To express our longing for peace. To make audible our solidarity with those subject to the violence of others. And we pray to remember those who so easily will be forgotten. For we have to believe, do we not, that the children who died this past week, as the children who will die this coming week, are deeply known of God; that they are forever remembered. We have to believe, do we not, that their lives were as infinitely precious as the lives of our own children. We have to believe that in a world where people choose to close and bomb hospitals that it will be possible for the people of these blood-stained lands one day to know peace.
In our particular Christian tradition, we pray on our feet, unless standing is something we cannot do. Having not grown up with that tradition, I have always liked that about Episcopalians. We pray ready to put form to our words; action to our good intentions. In 1965 when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel returned from Selma, AL, having taken part in the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, he was asked by someone, "Did you find much time to pray when you were in Selma?" Rabbi Heschel responded, "I prayed with my feet." I urge each of us to do likewise. Pray with your feet. Pray with your hands. Pray with your wallet. Pray with your social media post. Pray with your vote.
No parent, no doctor, no person should watch a child be bombed in a place set aside for their healing. There is a better way that we can live upon this earth. We are called to trust in the promise of God's kingdom of justice and peace. Don't stop praying for that. Change begins when people refuse to give up believing.
Peace,
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