Prayer doesn’t really play a role in my life anymore, but it certainly used to.

When I was a kid, my mother had me recite prayers with her each night. First, there was a comprehensive list of people who I asked God to “bless” – as if they had all sneezed at once: “God bless mummy, God bless Daddy, God Bless…” and on it went through my extended family. This was followed by a bit of gratitude: “Thank you God for giving me a lovely day, please help me to have another lovely day tomorrow, and help me to be a good boy, Amen.”

Once that was done, there was an optional “Lord’s Prayer,” aka “Our Father,” which I only did if I needed any extra sympathy from the Almighty, or if I thought it was a good idea to bank a bit of extra piety for a rainy day.

This nightly ritual seems a bit strange in retrospect, as we weren’t an especially religious family, but nightly rituals – especially those that remind you of the important people in your life, or express a bit of gratitude – are probably not a bad thing. I’m sure that any benevolent creator up there had more important business than ensuring that I had another lovely day tomorrow. But I sometimes wonder if verbalizing my wish to be a good person might have sat there in the back of my mind, and thereby felt like a promise I was making to myself, and to the world, to be better.

That self-promise is what Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner’s “A Prayer for Peace” feels like to me. Not so much a wish sent to a higher power, but a promise made to oneself.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The six-line melody that Croker repeats on the trumpet at various points, like a mantra.

2. The upwards-moving chords that Fortner plays under that melody, like a message heading out into the world.

3. The absence of a fixed time signature, as if the world pauses to listen.

Recommended listening activity:

Promising.

Buy it here.

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