“My Easter Prayer”

 

BY GREER GARSON

Dear Lord, once again we give thanks for the final triumph of Our Saviour over persecution and death. We pray that if it be Thy will we may soon give thanks also for the end of war all over the world. While the dark days of cruelty and suffering continue, comfort those whose hearts are anxious and grieving, and grant us grace to be worthy of our brave fighting men and to keep bright the ideals for which they are enduring so much.

Teach us never again to take our happiness for granted, but to be mindful of the blessings that each day brings. Help us to be more tolerant and understanding and to think of our fellowmen in every part of the world.

Help us to come to our senses. Inspire our leaders with Thy spirit and wisdom to plan for the years ahead. And help each of us to follow Thy teachings in our daily lives so that there may be an end of wars. In our Easter prayers we repeat the words our Savior Himself has taught us: “Thy Kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

BY JOHN GARFIELD

When I returned from my overseas trip last year I telephoned the mother of a soldier.

“I saw your son two months ago,” I told her, after introducing myself. “He was in fine spirits. He looked healthy and happy. And he asked me to give you his love and tell you he’d be home as soon as his job was done.”

There followed a short silence. Then a fine, firm voice softly answered:

“Last week I received official notice that my boy was missing in action,” she said, “but nothing will ever make me believe it is true. So long as there is life left in my own body I shall never stop hoping.”

My Easter prayer is for that mother. My prayer is for every mother whose heart is filled with hope and faith. I pray for fulfillment of hope and triumph of faith for such mothers all over the world.

 

BY OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND

My prayer this Easter day is for humility—the humility Christ taught—for I would be humble and grateful, not arrogant and proud, in the hour of victory.

I pray that I—that none of us—will ever forget that victory comes dear, that our best young men in the hundreds of thousands have died so that we might have this hour of triumph.

I hope that we will remember too the millions of Chinese men and women and children, and British men and women and children, and Russian men and women and children—not just the combatants, but the innocent dead—the plain people of all the world who will not be here to celebrate the victory they helped to win because they stood firm—and died—when the aggressor came.

With humility in the memory of those who have bought us yet another chance to make good, let us, I pray, try to put together our shattered world so firmly this time, and so justly, that the horrible holocaust of war cannot strike out at peace and decency and freedom again.

 

BY MARIA MONTEZ

My Easter prayer is one I have made a thousand times since my husband went overseas to the battlefronts and the war became a hauntingly terrible personal thing.

I pray little prayers each day for the war to end soon with victory in our hands.

I pray my husband will be unharmed.

I pray all the men who have left their homes for the loneliness and danger and suffering that war brings to them, in a measure that we—the safe ones—can never understand, will come back safe and soon.

I pray there will be peace and freedom in the world.

I pray for happiness as a possession shared.

I pray for little things important only to me and for the things which make life good for all of us.

 

BY ALAN LADD

My prayer is for all the men of America who have taken up arrns to fight the evil forces of Fascism, and especially for those who have given up their lives so that those evil forces could not destroy the freedom which our nation has struggled for generations to achieve and to preserve.

I pray for them and for their comrades in arms, the Allied soldiers who stand with them in the great fight.

I pray that they soon will achieve complete victory and can come home to help build a lasting peace so that all decent people everywhere can be safe and free, not just for a generation, but for all time.

I pray too for the loved ones of those men in arms who do their fighting on the home front, but who are no less devoted to the sacred ideals we are fighting for—ideals given to the world centuries ago by the Prince of Peace, whose resurrection we celebrate today.

 

BY LIONEL BARRYMORE

For myself I ask nothing. I am content.

There is an old saying that man needs but little here below. This seems particularly true in my case. After all I can eat only three meals a day and sleep eight hours. So my own personal desires can easily be filled with a good book or with a good piece of music.

But for the others—and for myself as well, in the sense that we all share, however remotely, in the good or ill that comes to the world—my greatest desire is to see the end of the terrible conflict which is now destroying mankind.

My prayer is for a time when men learn to settle disputes by reason and understanding instead of by resort to arms.

Humanity’s greatest boon will be the day when “Peace on earth, good will toward men” dawns in its truest sense and wars remain only a ghastly memory.

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE APRIL 1945