Prayer for Peace

“We had a national curfew so everyone knew to be off the streets by 7. We all knew not to go places alone and what places to avoid.” These were the words of my friend Magy when I asked about her summer. While I spent my summer staying out late with friends, her summer was spent in her apartment avoiding the violence that lurked outside. “The sad part was watching and hearing about the burnings of all those buildings, especially churches.”

I met Magy my freshman year of high school. We were both members of our school’s performing arts program and became good friends. We’ve since gone to different colleges, but we still stay in touch and get lunch whenever we are both in town.

Although she has lived in the United States for five years now, Magy grew up in Egypt and returns there every summer to reunite with her family and friends. It’s easy to ignore the violence when you are safe in the United States, but when your friend is in the heart of it, the way you look at the state of crisis changes.

This Wednesday, September 25, is International Peace Day. These silly sounding “holidays” come up all the time. But this time, with Magy’s stories fresh in my mind, I’m forced to think harder about what it means to be a member of this world, a world with a goal of peace, safety, and tranquility.

In accordance with International Peace Day, Pope Francis recently said, “I invite Catholics around the world to join other Christians to continue imploring God to bring the gift of peace to the most tormented places on our planet. May peace, a gift from Jesus, live always in our hearts and sustain the ideas and actions of United Nations leaders and those of all men of good will.”

His call for prayer is a chance for us to focus on and invest our time in praying for peace. It is easy to find something else to do. It is easy to say that between rehearsal and classes and practice and homework that you don’t have time to pray for peace. But here is an occasion to commit to praying for something greater than yourself and your own problems. It is a chance to focus on people far away and problems that are far away, but none the less real. It is a time to pray for young people just like Magy.

“Let us all be committed to efforts for a diplomatic and political solution in the hotbeds of war that are still a cause for concern. My thoughts go out especially to our dear Syrian people, whose human tragedy can only be resolved through dialogue and negotiation, in the respect for justice and the dignity of each person, especially the weakest and the most defenseless,” the pope said.

See, each person in Syria and the Middle East is a Magy. Even if you don’t know them, they are our friends, our family, because they are someone else’s friend and family. As violence and terror continue across the world, we must stand for peace. We must stand for what is right.

So let us follow our Pope’s plee and pray for diplomacies and dignity. Let us take the time that we have and use it to pray for others. Let us pray for no more destruction, for happiness and hope, and, most importantly, for peace.