Prayers of the Faithful

We pray that in your love you hear this prayer,
Although your grace is cried for everywhere.
To save us from despair, we need you near us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because we have no shame in ceaseless sins;
Because temptation wins, and wins, and wins,
We need your patient strength to stop and steer us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because we speak too much; because, though weak,
We are not meek, and scorn what we should seek,
Invert our thirst for others to revere us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because it is so certain that we doubt,
Forgetting what the faithless are without,
And know not why, of trustless anguish clear us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

We pray that in your mercy you forgive
All those who mock how you want us to live;
And those who hear us speak your name, and jeer us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Remind us of your warmth too close to touch:
We are so poor, and yet are loved so much;
Feel worthless, yet are priceless.  Let that cheer us.
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Finished 24th June, 2010.  First published in Oremus, the parish magazine of Westminster Cathedral, Edition 208 (November 2018), p. 15, and reprinted here with permission.

Sunday morning Mass at the parish church of Saint Martin, Meudon, Île-de-France.

On Praying for Ukraine

In recent days two notices, each outside different Anglican churches, have happened to catch my eye.  One read, ‘We Pray for Ukraine’; the other, ‘Ukrainians Welcome Here’.  

And so we should, and so they should be.  But ought we not also, albeit in a different way, to be praying for Russia; should Russians of good will not also be made welcome?  The obvious plight of Ukraine makes our prayers as straightforward as they are ardent, but it seems to me to be no less important to pray for Russia, even if the words are necessarily more complex and rather harder to say.  The sparing of the young army conscripts and their families, the consolation of the unjustly bereaved, the success of those working underground or behind the scenes to bring a just end to the whole situation, in general the liberation of Russia’s people from their thousand-year nightmare, and — perhaps most difficult of all — the conversion and ultimately the forgiveness of her leaders and soldiers who have willingly spilled blood and brought disgrace on their nation — all these we can surely pray for without excusing or overlooking in any way the evil that has been done in Russia’s name.

Since a nation is a larger, looser version of a family, the bonds that bind it implicate all its members in its collective reputation, its collective fate.  But although the fate is collective, responsibility for that fate is not.  Thus, while the name of Russia is soiled by this new outrage, only a minority of Russians are actually to blame for it.  It is a horrible situation for them — certainly, more abstract and less raw in its horror than having one’s homeland blasted to ashes, but horrible nonetheless.  To pray for them is an act both of mercy and of justice.

The intentions behind the churches’ signs were good and sincere, I do not doubt, and I am confident that any Russians appearing in the pews would be welcomed there in practice, but we should do our best not to leave these things in any doubt, nor to let it be thought that our prayers are too hasty, or too reflexive, or unduly partial.  So, hard as it may be in this one-sided situation, we should try to pray for consolation wherever there is suffering, for justice wherever there is injustice, for mercy wherever there is contrition.

Happy birthday, Pope Francis!

Happy eightieth birthday to the unstoppable Pope Francis, who continues to teach and us less by words (which I think he sees as a secondary tool) than by gesture and example, in which his real homilies are to be found. 

“How many of you speak Spanish?” Pope Francis prays with refugees in Rome.

He is certainly a Pope who pulls no punches: man has, he says, “slapped nature in the face”; young people are to “renounce the sofa” — and remember the “Curse my mother; expect a punch” line?  People don’t realise how much tougher a nut he is than Benedict ever was!  But he has to be tough.  Time is short.  The world is awash with wrongdoing and riven by evil, and Francis has more to contend with even than the unfolding spiritual decline of the West.  As I have pointed out before, I think he wants to concentrate on the rest of the world before Europe, whose faithful remnant, with its particular mission, can still draw on the (far-from-exhausted) well of teaching of Benedict and St. John Paul, in addition to Francis’s, for years to come.

“Pray for me,” he has asked us, so we should do so.  And the same for his predecessor.