This Week's Prayer

Dear Beat, rhythm and Beatitude of life and being, pulse of existence,

Everything we have ever known and will ever know is one.

We wonder, with Kerouac, “what God had wrought when he made life so sad,” even as we also sense that “life is holy and every moment is precious.”

We grieve the violence that killed journalist James Foley and so many others.

Our hearts go out to the kidnapped, to the long-term disappeared, to the survivors of kidnapping;

to the rescuers combing through the site of landslides triggered by rain in Hiroshima, Japan, desperately wishing not to find more bodies;

to those clearing up from the flash flooding in Arizona and those enduring severe drought in California;

to the scientists working to learn and tell us about the world’s weather;

to the tourists being evacuated in parts of Iceland, as another volcano threatens to erupt under the largest glacier;

to those who try to predict seismic events, things present and things to come, and thereby save lives;

to those in Western Africa suffering the Ebola virus or living in fear of it, and to the doctors and medical staff caring for them;

to those who teach and those who desperately, determinedly, seek an education that the sum of human understanding may grow – and to those who deny learning for themselves and others;

to those rioting in Missouri and to those harmed by the rioting; to the families of all those who never deserved to be killed by a police officer and to the officers wrestling with their demons and fears and inadequate training;

to all those who mourn.

May we all find a path to healing, to the holiness and preciousness, to the oneness of all we know.

May justice create the space for all beings to dance exultant joy to the universal beat.