From despair to respair

Available for 28 days

Prayer for the Day presented by Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark. Good morning. The world tends to divide into two in the mornings. Some are very sullen and quiet, and others are vivacious and energised. Personally, I take myself up a corner and spend twenty minutes each morning alone with a poem. I’ve always loved words and the struggle to find the ones that open doors onto how we understand things. I also love discovering when a language has a word for something that we just don’t have the equivalent of in English. Why don’t we have a word like SOBREMESA like the Italians do, a word referring to that lingering at the dinner table to chat after a meal is finished? Most of us would happily live with the Icelandic word SOLARFRI which refers to an unexpectedly sunny day that demands to be taken as an instant holiday. The Buli language of Ghana has the word PELINTI which describes the ‘hahaha’ sound we make when pushing very hot food around our mouth. And one of my favourites is from an Inuit language. IKTSUARPOK – this refers to the repeated process, when we are both anxious and excited, of us keep going outside and going to the window to check if a long-awaited guest is coming. One word, however, seems more important than ever to translate into our lives at the moment. It is an English word but has been forgotten. It has only ever been recorded once in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it is one of the lost great positive words of the English language – ‘respair’. It means fresh hope, a recovery from despair. I pray today for some respair in the world, respair in the hearts of those who are bowed down or struggling, and pray that we may have the will to bring it to those we will meet today to bring a horizon into view. Amen.