By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

DES MOINES, Iowa, March 28, 2026 — Ramadan has recently concluded, Holy Week starts now with Palm Sunday, Passover starts Wednesday, right?

Just in time, in my view.

So much and so many in this world need our prayers.

I’m going to share my most reliable prayers right here, the ones that somehow always seem to work for me. And please share yours, from whatever religion or philosophy you practice or admire. (Use the handy form for comments at the end of this column, or email me.)

No, we are not going to pray for victories for our favorite sports teams.

Can this pledge in a window transom at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Des Moines be considered a prayer? May it be so.

The prayer I probably go to most is the well-known “Serenity Prayer.” You know it: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Then there’s one I think I made up. It evolved from my 16 years (so far) of dealing with cancer — my own, that of others in my family, friends and anyone else in the Cancer Club, as I call it. “God, let me feel your hands on my shoulders, so that in times of confusion, worry, fear and pain, I will know that you are with me.”

I kept that one busy in recent weeks when my wife Mary Riche had a hip replacement, and when one of my granddaughters underwent a lesser but still frightening surgery. Both are doing fine. Among the requests for prayers that our Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Des Moines published this past week was a nice one asking “prayers of gratitude for the miracles of modern medicine and the skilled hands of a surgeon as Mary Riche successfully recovers from a total replacement of her right hip.”

A prayer that I sometimes feel like I’m wearing out, since at my advancing age I now seem to go so many funerals, is this: “Eternal rest grant unto (name the deceased), O Lord, and let your perpetual light shine upon (him or her). May (his or her) soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”

There is a prayer I’ve used almost as much, when deaths seem near, that I learned from Jim Teusch, of Jefferson, my friend and dentist. He is an Elder in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Standing together at the bedside of my late wife Carla Offenburger, when she was dying of cancer, I said to him, “Jim, please lead us in a prayer that you Saints use.” I loved what he said.

I can’t remember whether he addressed the prayer to God, Jesus or Whomever, but he folded his arms across his chest and then said, as best as I can remember: “We thank you for the privilege of being present. We sometimes get to be present when babies are born. We sometimes get to be present when loved ones and friends are leaving this world. Being present at these important times is a blessing, and let us use it to help others.”

Another form of prayer that’s been important to my wife Mary Riche and others — walking and praying on the Plymouth Labyrinth on Easter weekend in Des Moines. It’s become a tradition since Mary made a gift of it to the church in 2002.

Because I was raised Catholic and remained one until 2019, I still remember and recite the prayers we all memorized as kids: “The Apostles’ Creed,” “Our Father,” “Hail Mary,” “Glory Be,” “The Act of Contrition,” “Angel of God,” and others that kind of fade in and out for me, like the beautiful, “Hail, Holy Queen.”

I still carry my rosary in my pocket, and will pull it out and pray it when I’m alone, and especially if I’m rattled or bewildered. It works better when I hold the rosary in my fingers, moving bead-to-bead with each prayer.

There’s something about the structure and repetition of all those Catholic prayers that still brings me consolation and often peace.

Readers who have been with me a long time might remember that one of my great friends and mentors over a 40-year period was the late great Rev. Jim O’Connor, a Trappist priest and monk at New Melleray Abbey over near Dubuque. I dropped in and saw Father Jim anytime I got near the abbey.

Back in 2017, I asked him if, after his 68 years in the monastery, traditional prayer was still important to him.

“Yes, but after all the years I’ve been praying here, it’s really changed,” he said. “You know, when we came in here after the war as young novices, they’d give us a rosary that seemed like it was about three yards long, and we’d say the structured prayers — the Our Fathers, the Hail Marys — over and over and over. Now it’s more like an interior prayer life that I have. I find that I pray much of the time without words. I feel like I make direct contact with God in my thoughts, and then specific words aren’t important.”

After I joined Plymouth Church, those meditative kinds of prayer have become more important to me, too. I think that’s because when I hear our Plymouth pastors do a “pastoral prayer” that eventually leads us into the “Lord’s Prayer,” they usually make their meditation come very alive for me.

So here we go. We pray for peace, for our nation, for Iran, Gaza, Israel, Cuba, Ukraine and Russia. We pray for our allies and we pray for our enemies. We pray for our leaders and ask that you give them wisdom, compassion, kindness and courage. We pray for cures to all these diseases that threaten us. We pray for our clergy and for our churches, synagogues, mosques and temples.

And, as a book that is important to me suggests, “we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self–pity, dishonest or self–seeking motives.”

Finally, I pray in gratitude for the wonder and beauty of it all.

How about you?

The huge “Resurrection Window” viewed from inside Plymouth Church in Des Moines.

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.