My Unhappy Prayers for Ukraine
What do we do when we hear reports of a maternity hospital shelled, a boarding school for the visually impaired bombed, a bus shuttling orphaned children from danger blocked, families huddled in subways for weeks, weeping couples separating at the border? What spiritual response makes sense when we see the faces—tear-streaked, defiant, afraid? When our screens and devices deliver constant news of the miseries and horrors of war?
We can pray, to be sure. Intercessory prayer is a natural impulse. And I believe in getting specific in our asking. God invites us to come with our urgent requests. One of the professors at my seminary even said prayer is a protest with God against reality. Prayer can be more like beseeching than a polite conversation about the weather. Just read the Psalms to see how prayer can look like indignation in the presence of God.
But I’ve also noticed this: my prayers for Ukraine are usually more of an ache than a fully formed sentence. Sometimes our best prayers, said John Bunyan from a long-ago generation, have more groans than words.
It’s okay on some days not to fashion polished sentences. When you grieve, when you worry, when you yearn—prayers don’t need a lot of words. Heartfelt crying out isn’t always filled with fine prose.
What often matters most is simply sitting or standing before God and with a longing—for yourself, for others.
I love Ellis Peters’ Cadfael Chronicles, delightful mystery novels set in 12th century England. (Some of them have been made into a PBS series simply called Cadfael.) Cadfael is a monk, an herbalist, and a tender soul. In one of the novels, A Morbid Taste for Bones, he goes to the abbey church to pray for a young couple he’s worried about. I’ll never forget the scene Peters paints, a way forward for us, too, when our prayers stumble around in the face of evil and suffering: “[The monk Cadfael] prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding in his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands, all those people who were in stress or grief.”