The author of this week’s prayer writes, “Last week, our church hosted clergy from India, Holland, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic for an international meeting. I welcomed them with a sign listing their names and unsorted flags and invited observers to connect the national flag to each name. When some nations appear to want to pick a fight with other countries, friendly exercises respecting national culture can speak volumes.”
Note: All italicized responses to this week’s news are quotes from various writings by former U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who died in 1961.
The United States expelled South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool after Rasool made unfavorable comments about the MAGA movement in a podcast.
Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.
The United States and Venezuela, with El Salvador and Honduras mediating, have smoothed a process for Venezuela to admit Venezuelans removed by the United States government.
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.
Great Britain and Germany have warned their members to travel to the United States at their own risk, as the former ratchets up on unfriendly rhetoric toward LGBTQ travelers.
Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just.
Greenland’s prime minister called a planned visit to the island by US officials “highly aggressive,” plunging relations to a new low after US President Donald Trump vowed to annex the autonomous Danish territory.
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
Israel’s continual bombardment of Gaza killed 23 people, including seven children, in one day’s assaults this week.
The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.
Let us sing A Song of Peace in prayer (Finlandia):
This is my song
Oh gods of all the nations
A song of peace for lands so far away
This is my home, a country where my heart is
Here grew my hopes and dreams for all mankind
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight shines on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight too and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
Oh hear my prayer, o gods of all the nations
A song of peace for their lands and for mine
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