This Week's Prayer

Creation, power of healing, world community of life:

How can we pray when words are so inadequate? Words cannot capture the magnitude of the cosmos, or the feeling of breath, or of love, or the depth of our gratitude. Nor can words express the confusion, anger, fear, and pain among us.

How can we pray when words are so inadequate? Do not our feelings belong rather to whistles of amazement, sighs of wonder, gasps of astonishment, howls of frustration, and whispers of anguish?

Yet, beginning in wordless noises of emotion, let us nevertheless grope toward articulation – knowing the words will be inadequate, but needing to say them.

Thank you for the prophets, the millions of anonymous kind hearts, the dedicated, courageous and visionary – the ones who came before us and did the slow work of building social systems of cooperation, community, trust – the makers of the space and structure for flourishing that we so gratefully inherit.

Our hearts are thankful – and our hearts are anguished.

We remember:
the peoples of West Africa, threatened by the Ebola virus
the people of Canada in the wake of unexplained violence in the capital
the victims of violence of every kind
the disenfranchised and disappointed
those in pain and in the throes of deep grief
those without food and those who have far too much
those who are alone and forgotten
those who are in prison: the tragedy that so many don’t need to be there, and the different tragedy that some do
those for whom war is an ever-present reality

Why are we not delivered from these scourges, healed of this pain? Where is the intelligence and the heart that would have prevented this? That would be guiding us now to end violence, war, hunger, slavery, homelessness?

We are the power, the love, the justice, and the peace. The power is with us and in us and is us.

May we be united respectfully amidst our differences, transcend our tribalism, and make good our capacity to heal ourselves and this dear world.