How to Pray for Ukraine

Ukraine's top Church leader, Metropolitan Onufriy, not only called on his people to pray, but gave them a prayer rule. It is short and simple, and he asked them to pray it at least once a day.

Pray Psalm 90 (91) with twelve prostrations or bows. "He who dwells in the help of the most high shall abide in the shelter of heaven's God."...

Bishop Daniel of Santa Rosa (California), who spoke to one of the Ukrainian bishops in the past few days, suggested we all join them in their prayer rule, as well as fasting for them. All these events are happening just on the verge of Great Lent, and with such a disruption of daily life, Ukrainians will not be able to fast as they normally would. So, this is an opportunity to take up our brother's burden and carry it for him.

And if you want to pray more specifically for the situation in Ukraine, you could either add some of the psalms below or occasionally use them instead of Psalm 90, above.

Below, you will see the "Peace and War" section of St. Arsenios's Psalter as a Book of Needs. You will see specific topics and psalms that could be read as prayers for the strife in Ukraine. The first number is the Septuagint number (if you are using the Orthodox Study Bible) and the number in parentheses is the numbering used in most other Bibles in English.

Peace and War (revision-in-process of The Psalter as a Book of Needs)
26 (27) That God protect the people from invaders, that they do no harm to people or fields.
33 (34) When invaders threaten the borders of the land.
42 (43) That the people be freed from imprisonment in an unrighteous land.
73 (74) That God protect, when surrounded by attackers.
78 (79) That God protect from theft and looting.
93 (94) That God illumine those bringing disorder and division to the nation and the people.
107 (108) That God humble our enemies, changing their bad intentions.
111 (112) That God protect soldiers when they go to war.
117 (118) That God humble those surrounding and terrorizing us, reversing their bad intentions.
118 (119) That God bring down the wicked when they slay the innocent.
120 (121) That God protect the most unfortunate, that they not be killed before being delivered.
127 (128) That the bad intentions of the enemy never approach the home, and that God's peace and blessing remain.
131 (132) That God show pity on the world in time of continual war.
132 (133) That God illumine the nations, and that their cooperation bring peace to all mankind.
135 (136) That God protect refugees when they flee for safety.
140 (141) That God make peaceful the tormenting leader.
141 (142) That God make peaceful the unrighteous one who is working brutality and evil.
143 (144) That God pacify unrest, thus to prevent civil unrest.

Comments

  1. Strange HappeningsWednesday, March 16, 2022

    I used Psalm 135 in this manner this morning, and it is excellent. At the beginning of the psalm, I could not quite understand its use in this context, but by the end, I felt quite differently. It is recounting the wandering in the desert, the Israelites' refugee crisis. It fits so well, and is a type of alignment of our prayer to God's ultimate plan.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did Christ Dwell Among or In Us?

One day last year, during a dogmatics class, the verse in St. John’s Prologue where he says Christ came and dwelt among us came up conversation. I forget why it came up, but what caught my attention was the little preposition: εν (“en”). That is what is normally translated as ‘among’ in most English translations, but to my knowledge it had more of the meaning of the English word ‘in’. ‘Among’ and ‘in’ have two very different meanings in my mind. Orthodox theology is very clear about God taking on human nature and deifying it. ‘Among’ sounds more like God coming, living alongside us, maybe the same place and same time, but still as something other than us. But I only have a feel for these words in English; what I really wondered was what the feel of the Greek word εν is in Greek, that is, to a native Greek speaker. When we were discussing this, Bishop Alexis happened to be right down the hall, and he spent more than twenty years living and breathing the services, the Scriptures, and the...
Read more

The Making of a Thai Paschal Troparion

This is the making of a paschal troparion, the hymn “Christ is risen from the dead…”, in the Thai language and from the Thai culture. For obvious reasons—my wife is Thai and the whole family is highly affected by our ties to Thai culture—we have closely watched the progress of the Orthodox Church in Thailand. If there had been a paschal troparion in Thai, we would have been using it in our house years ago. But instead, every year, we bemoan the lack of a Thai troparion and talk about how wonderful it would be to have one. It is a small consolation that we have a Chinese paschal troparion that we love, one that feels Chinese, and thus a little bit closer to our Asian home. And then, a Thai troparion appeared. A few weeks ago, my wife showed me a Facebook post with a Thai paschal troparion, sung by Matushka Ksenia , wife of a Russian priest serving a parish in Thailand. (In that video, he is singing the isan, the drone note, but it is my understanding that she wrote the troparion.) Jus...
Read more