This Week's Prayer

All of all,

We begin in gratitude. Let us say again what we have said before: Thank you.

Thank you for the heart that beats in our chest. For the lungs and air to breathe. Thank you for this day, for its challenges, its rests, its excitements, its moments of calm, its lessons and its tests.

Thank you for the love that connects us with others and that lifts us from the delusion of separation – the love that does not come from us, though it comes through us, that is not directed toward us, but surrounds us.

We begin in gratitude and move toward hope.

Grateful for compassion, we hope to nurture it in our hearts and to act from it with our hands – with our time and resources.

May our compassion encompass prisoners throughout the world. May the innocent be freed and the guilty restored and reconciled.

May our compassion encompass the refugees, and all those who have been displaced from their homes. Our hearts go out, for example, to detention camps in New Mexico where children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere are being held.

May our compassion encompass Syria, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Afghanistan, and countries affected by the Boko Haram insurgency, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger. May peace with justice come to those troubles peoples.

We are grateful for the ceasefire announced in Ukraine. May it hold.

May our compassion encompass all faiths and tribes. This week in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Deah Shaddy Barakat, his spouseYusor Mohammad and her sibling Razan were killed by their neighbor. May we remember them, and their memories spur the work of building understanding.

May our compassion encompass all our neighbors, embodying and realizing love. May we see in others the divinity that dwells in us all. And may we thus be transformed into clearer vessels of that shining love.