This Week's Prayer

“O God, root and source of body and soul, we ask for boldness in confronting evil. When you are within us, we have the power to countenance all that is untrue. O Father and Mother of all humankind, may we redeem our failings by the good work that we do. In the name of the one, the only God.” (Khasi Unitarian Prayer, SLT #516)

O Father and Mother of all life,

We ask -- for in articulating what we want, we direct our hearts and our energies toward it. We ask for boldness in confronting evil. We ask to awaken from our complacency. We ask to be agents of awakening our nation from its complacency.

We ask for the strength to stand against the complacency that allows 33,000 gun-related human deaths per year in this country, including over 11,000 gun homicides, over 21,000 gun suicides, and over 500 deaths from accidental gun discharge.

On this day when we bless the nonhuman animals with which we share our planet and many of us share our homes, we ask to awaken from our complacency about cruelty. Let us, for starters, stand against CAFOs – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. CAFOs constitute only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, and they produce more than 50 percent of our food animals. CAFOs inflict unconscionable cruelty on beings as intelligent and sensitive as the beloved pets among us today.

There is no reason to eat meat at all, we know, but let us at least put an end to the operations of most intense and most prolonged misery. We ask to awaken from our complacency. We ask to take to heart the words of Mahatma Gandhi when he said, “The measure of a society can be how well it treats its animals.”