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Today is a Day of Prayer and Fasting for the Holy Land

Today is a Day of Prayer and Fasting for the Holy Land

Last updated on: October 17, 2023 at 9:37 am by Rebecca Hamilton

Today is a Day of Prayer and Fasting for the Holy Land 2023-10-17T09:37:59-06:00 Rebecca Hamilton

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Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has called for Christians worldwide to join together in a day of fasting, abstinence and prayer for peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land.

This is the same Cardinal Pierbattista who offered to give himself as a hostage to Hamas in exchange for the kidnapped Israeli children.

Our Holy Father, Pope Francis has echoed this call.

You don’t have to be Orthodox Catholic or Roman Catholic to join this. You can be a member of any denomination or faith. You can be a doubter. You can be a denier of God. Anyone — anyone at all — can turn to Him in prayer for our brothers and sisters who are trapped in the destruction of war.

God is Love, Life and Hope and He is real, no matter what we think.

Let’s join together and turn to the great I Am Who breathed all of existence into existence, the One who thought the laws of physics into reality, who holds the swirling vastness of creation in existence alongside the cry of terrified hostages, the stunned incomprehension of the bombed, the anguish of the raped, the desolation of the grieved, and the wrath of the vengeful.

We are all part of His creation, all part of the vast existence of existence which is but a single thought in His mind.

The same God Whose reach is so vast and whose meaning and purpose are far beyond our comprehension, this same vast, seemingly unknowable God, cares about us. I know this because I have experienced it.

This same God Who is outside our understanding took on human form and suffered what we suffer; all the indignities, the temptations to vengeance, the angers and pain; Who suffered even condemnation and death at our hands. He did all this so that we could understand Him. Jesus Christ is God made accessible. And through Him we have a conduit to the Source of all life. We don’t have to struggle to go to Him. He came to us.

No one and no thing — no priest, no cruelty, no unbelieving philosophy of nihilism and despair, can break the unbreakable bond that holds us alive and living in the mind and heart of our Creator. We are His by simple definition and the reality of our place in the order of things. And He loves us.

I know He loves us because I have felt that love. I know that when things are at their worst, when there is nothing left to hold onto, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, shows up and walks with you through the horror, pain, shame and grief. I know because it has happened to me.

Corrie Ten Boom said that what she learned from the Nazi concentration camp was that “there is no pit so deep that He is not there.”

The intractable hatreds of the Middle East, fueled as they are by lifetimes of injustice, death and senseless violence, would seem to be beyond our power to heal or change. You cannot make peace, if, as the Scriptures say, when you speak of peace, they are for war. You must make war when war is waged against you. Otherwise you will not survive, and the duty to fight to live, to fight for survival is the intrinsic burden of every living thing.

The horror of annihilation and death, the will to fight to live, is encoded into every living thing. It runs through all life; into every anthill, pack, pride, family, clan, city, state, nation or tribe.

We fight for life and the life of what we hold dear because that is how we are made. The compulsion to fight for life is the basic impulse of everything that lives. If this was not so, there would be no life. Life would never survive the hardships that being alive imposes.

How do we reach beyond that impulse that drives us to fight for our lives, and the lives of our kind, even to the point of disregarding the lives of other people?

The only way to control that great imperative of being alive when it becomes an instrument of death and annihilation is to turn to the God Who made everything there is, including us.

God is far greater than we have the capacity to know. It is a hint of just how great and vast He is that the same God who breathed the vastness of existence into existence can still know and love each one of us personally, as the irreplaceable masterpiece of creation that we are. Our only way out of the morass of our own violent tribalism is to turn in humility to that love.

To kill another human being is to kill the Image of God in frail and mortal human flesh. It is tossing aside the miracle of existence; a living, thinking, reacting, feeling, soul.

War is in our nature. Dividing people into us “us” and “them” is innate to us and who we are. It’s why we enjoy football rivalries. It’s why we wage wars. It’s why we can kill each other and stay sane afterwards.

But it is based on a lie. There is no “us” and “them” between humans. We are all “us” because we are all His children.

The irony of our times is that we have to learn to control this compulsion to fight for our lives or we will wipe our entire species from existence. We are magnificent creatures. Twenty-five thousand years ago, we were squatting around campfires, cleaving primitive tools from rocks and painting on cave walls. In that speck of time, we have become star seed who are planning to travel to other planets and somehow form them into another earth.

We are also destroyers who are on the brink of our own self-caused annihilation every day we exist. We are raping the environment and building means of destruction that destroy worlds. We are slaves to self, to greed, hate, lies and malice.

The only way — the. only. way. — we will survive to become whatever it is we are destined to become is if we turn to the God Who made us and let Him teach us another way.

Jesus is God Who walked among us. He is God Who made everything, everywhere, Who breathed existence into existence. And he became one of us so that we could know and understand the parts of God that we need to know to survive. His message was simple and impossible: Love one another. Avoid any kind of greed. Your brother or sister is the one who needs your help. You are all precious. Male, female, slave, free, Jew, non-Jew, they are all one in His sight.

I’m going to heed the call to prayer for the Middle East. I’m also going to pray for Ukraine and for the people in Congress, that they not elect someone who is hell-bent on destroying American democracy to be Speaker of the House.

These are perilous times. But that has always been true for every generation. The lives of our cave-painting, flint-knife-making ancestors were certainly as perilous as ours. Life is beautiful and wonderful and hard. If it wasn’t encoded into us to fight for our lives, no one and nothing would be alive.

That is not bad. It is not a sin. We just have to turn that drive over to the One Who made us and pray that He will empower us to use it for His purposes.

From Catholic World Report:

The Latin Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem has called for a day of prayer and fasting on Tuesday, Oct. 17 for peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa has urged Catholics to organize times of prayer with Eucharistic adoration and recitation of the Rosary “to deliver to God the Father our thirst for peace, justice, and reconciliation.”

“In this time of sorrow and dismay, we do not want to remain helpless. We cannot let death and its sting (1 Cor 15:55) be the only word we hear,” he said in a statement issued on Oct. 11.

“That is why we feel the need to pray, to turn our hearts to God the Father. Only in this way we can draw the strength and serenity needed to endure these hard times, by turning to Him, in prayer and intercession, to implore and cry out to God amidst this anguish.”

Pizzaballa, who serves as the head of Latin Catholics living in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Cyprus, acknowledged that the war may inhibit many Catholics in the Holy Land from organizing large gatherings and encouraged “simple and sober common moments of prayer in parishes, religious communities, and families.”

In response, Catholics from around the world have also pledged on social media to join in the fast for peace in the Holy Land in solidarity, which falls on the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the first-century bishop and martyr from Syria.

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