Bishops of the UOC of the USA pray for the Victims in Las Vegas
"We find ourselves this day filled with compassion for the families of the victims who perished in the worst massacre of human life in the history of our nation. We find within ourselves this day an insatiable desire to pray for those victims, that our Lord will grant them a place of rest where the Light of His Countenance shines upon them as they await the great and final judgment. And oddly, we find ourselves this day in a state of shock that such a horrific attack can take place once again without any warning, without any obvious reason and without anyone who will really be capable of explaining. We will hear theory after conjecture, after just plain guesswork on the part of pundit after pundit after pundit. We will, however, probably never fully comprehend why such a horror as this Las Vegas attack can happen or how man can be so cruel to man", reads the statement issued by bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the United States of America.
They addressed the faithful with the appeal about prayer. "We need this day, dearly beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, to fall down on our knees before that God of Love. We must pray fervently that the Lord will “deliver us from all blindness, forgetfulness, despondency and all hardened insensitivity”…
It is by this common prayer on the part of each and every one of us – each and every day or even more than once a day – that the terrorism of this modern age can be crushed. Bigger and better weapons of mass destruction, huge numbers of them, have failed to crush it. The power of faith and trust, however, is beyond and above the power of those man-made weapons. The God of Love, a God Who will not allow us to completely destroy His Creation or ourselves, can and will respond to our prayers – prayers, which we must not consider to be strictly the domain of Orthodox Christians, but those of all mankind. Faith and trust in that God, dearly beloved brothers and sisters, will bring His intervention and healing to a suffering world.
At least 59 people have been killed and at least 527 injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. A gunman fired on the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas from an overlooking hotel.
