We can’t pray hard enough or well enough for peace, for reconciliation, for humanity; aghast at the waste of precious resources from minerals and wheatfields to the lives torn apart in numbers that are hard to translate into faces and names. When it feels as if I am being drawn into the deep darkness, I find encouragement to stand (fairly) firm by calling to mind this icon of an ageless God-bearer. I see her looking up confidently beseeching her Son, and inviting us to join her, whether we are in Advent or Candlemass, singing the Magnificat or at the foot of the cross, in awe at Pentecost, or at the hour of our death.
Greek Icon of the Mother of God: it is sometimes on our altar in Advent and for Ascension tide.
Most Holy Mother of God,
We pray to you as mother of the Church,
mother of all Christians who suffer,
mother to all who reach out in their need.
We beg you, through your ardent intercession…
to bring down the walls of our hearts,
and all the walls that generate hatred, violence, fear and indifference
between people and between nations.
…gather and unite us, protect us from all evil and
open forever in our lives the gate of Hope…
Adapted from a prayer for the icon Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls, written on the separation wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem in 2010,