[Archbishop of Canterbury] The Most. Rev. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, has published the following essay on war, peace and building a new world out of brokenness in The Guardian.

In the midst of the Second World War, Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, a pastor and physician with the German army at Stalingrad, drew a Madonna which hung pinned to a mud wall outside the dugout. In the midst of the darkness, the brutality and the cruelty of war, he portrayed a mother protecting her child from the world. Around the margin are the words: “Licht, Leben, Liebe.” In the depths of conflict and suffering that have occurred so often in the history of humanity (and still occur today), people have always imagined those possibilities: light, life and love.

Peace is something that human beings long for – in our lives, our families, our communities, our country and our world. And yet we are living again in the shadow of war in Europe as Ukraine fights for its existence, hearing regular stories of the chaos, cruelty, suffering and destruction that characterizes the effect of war on blameless people.

Read the entire essay here.