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Eye on the World: prayer to end violence
A mass shooting on a California college campus in the United States, attacks at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and continuing conflict in Ukraine. Stories like these suggest that the world is being consumed by violence. Still, even as these events flare up, good and brave people are working to find solutions for safety and peace, and our prayer can help to support those striving for good and disarm whatever would oppose it. The Christian Science Monitor covers such stories from a solution-oriented angle, providing “news for thought” such as this insightful report on the Santa Barbara, California, shootings.
So what’s our role when reports of violence come our way? In this article, “Big prayers plug us in to progress,” a Monitor journalist tells of his own spiritual journey and how the lessons he has learned inspired him. He says, “I’ve come to think of prayers that include our neighbors as ‘big’ prayers. They’re focused on much more than ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ They’re about ‘our’ and ‘us.’”
And is there a resource to rely on? In “Violence — let it end here,” the writer draws on the Bible as a powerful resource, which speaks of how people over the centuries have been blessed and helped by the peace of God and thinking of God as the source of peace.
You may also enjoy “Living peace to end war,” in which the writer shares insights into the Lord’s Prayer and how she found that her prayers could help whether she was praying about situations “over here” or “over there.” She writes: “When we think of God’s will as the one and only force, expressed as infinity, it follows that there is only one locality. There is no such place as ‘over there.’ Here is the only locality, whether we call it heaven or earth, east or west, over here or over there.”