We are there on the first day of the Great Fast—Lent in the Byzantine rite church—and so the congregation is invited to conduct prostrations. This is a penitential ritual that has elderly members of the faithful falling to their knees over and over, touching their heads to the floor and singing in their native tongue a song I later would learn translates to a request to avoid “a spirit of slothfulness, of negligence, of lust of power, of vain babbling.” Instead they ask to secure “the spirit of continence, of meekness, of patience and of love.” And, as tanks slowly crawled across their ancestral homeland, they pray, “Yea, Lord and King, grant that I may perceive my transgressions and judge not my brother, for You are blessed forever and ever.”
At the front of the church, near where an American flag, a Vatican flag and a Ukrainian flag stand in a row, a woman with long, dark curly hair and a black puffy winter coat rises to her feet and smiles. “As you can tell, we are Muslim,”
When I get home, I learn that a 40-mile-long convoy of tanks is headed to Kyiv. I draw a sharp breath as my stomach drops. Everything feels worse than it was before I left. And so it goes, those moments of exquisite grace and excruciating pain, inextricably bound on the world stage. Had I really expected our prayers to make an instant difference?
I went to a Ukrainian Catholic Church to pray a rosary for peace. I didn’t expect to find Muslims th | Religious Forums