October 7, 2026
The Mercy of Older Words
An ancient prayer from Ignatius for love, morning, strength.
Prayer is not an escape hatch from the world. In the older Christian writers, it is usually the opposite: a way of standing still long enough for God to tell the truth about the world and about us.
So the invitation is simple: do not merely admire the sentence. Borrow it. Pray it until it starts telling the truth in your own voice.
Source boundary: this post reflects on A Prayer for the Privilege of Martyrdom, attributed in the corpus to Ignatius of Antioch. No outside sources used.