The present spir­i­tu­al and re­li­gious re­al­i­ty of the ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple of the hemi­sphere is their ad­her­ence to one faith or the oth­er of the Chris­t­ian re­li­gion. It’s a known and prac­tised fall­back po­si­tion when hu­mankind is faced with prob­lems that can­not be re­solved, to turn to the op­tion of prayer to a god of their choice.

If the bib­li­cal in­junc­tion to ad­her­ents of the faith is to ask for bless­ings and to ex­pect them to come through, now is the time of ask­ing and with the ex­pec­ta­tion of mir­a­cles be­ing the out­come.

Turn­ing to prayer in a Chris­t­ian-cen­tred part of the world, when diplo­ma­cy, threats of be­wil­der­ing and de­struc­tive im­pend­ing vi­o­lence to those who refuse to lis­ten to the en­treaties of the pow­er­ful have all failed as a de­ter­rence against war, must be con­sid­ered as a pos­si­ble so­lu­tion.

Not on­ly is the po­ten­tial for there to be a fair­ly wide­spread hemi­spher­ic war a pos­si­ble out­come of the hard talk and threats, but so too can such a po­ten­tial war bring those out­side of the hemi­sphere to be­come in­volved, and that threat has al­ready been made known.

The ad­vo­ca­cy of prayer is far from be­ing for­eign to known pos­si­ble so­lu­tions, which even those about to be en­gulfed in vi­o­lence usu­al­ly seek to adopt on oc­ca­sion as a last re­sort to avoid un­nec­es­sary loss of life.

The fact is that the in­ter­na­tion­al par­lia­men­tary sys­tem, which was de­vel­oped af­ter World War II to avoid all fu­ture wars, has not worked, as to­day, small and large wars are every­where to be found, all re­sult­ing in un­nec­es­sary loss of that most sa­cred gift of life. And just in case any­one is mind­ed to for­get, WWII re­sult­ed in an es­ti­mat­ed 70 to 85 mil­lion peo­ple los­ing their lives.

Wars to­day in the Mid­dle East, in Rus­sia and Ukraine, sev­er­al parts of Asia and Africa, are all be­ing fought with­out an am­i­ca­ble end in sight. Tem­po­rary cease­fires are turn­ing out to be just that—a tem­po­rary abate­ment in the loss of life to be re­sumed in good enough time when the com­bat­ants feel it ap­pro­pri­ate to con­tin­ue the slaugh­ter.

The plead­ings to end the po­ten­tial con­flict in this part of the world and the so­lu­tions that have emerged up to this point have been based on le­gal­i­ty, a means to an end, what has been called crim­i­nal­i­ty, and the ap­peals to good sense and the avoid­ance of wide­spread death and de­struc­tion, but have been stu­dious­ly ig­nored.

In fact, the in­ten­si­ty and seem­ing cer­tain­ty of war be­com­ing a re­al­i­ty are more like­ly. With such a re­al­i­ty, there has been an in­creas­ing build-up of mil­i­tary hard­ware ready and wait­ing to be utilised to mur­der hu­mans and de­stroy the liv­ing and work­ing en­vi­ron­ment of the con­ti­nent and the Caribbean is­lands spread across the Arch­i­pel­ago.

Al­so be­com­ing more like­ly is the in­volve­ment of Rus­sia and Chi­na, giv­en their as­so­ci­a­tion with Venezuela and their own stri­dent con­tests with the Unit­ed States. In the cir­cum­stances, call­ing on the Chris­t­ian God in this sea­son of peace must be an op­tion, even if to give po­ten­tial par­tic­i­pants a mo­ment to pause and re­flect.