Creator God
Loving Mother and Father
Sustaining Spirit
My truest home
With me but not of me
Holy and wholly different
Grant me Your grace
To live embodying Your love
For all of Your creation
Each one of Your creatures
(myself included)
Nourish me each day
With Your sufficient, sustaining grace
Forgive my falterings and failings
Look lovingly on me
So that I may look lovingly on all others
Even those whom I feel do me wrong
Protect me from my demons
From doubt, depression, despair
From rage and bitterness
Protect me from all evil
Within and without
Please let it be so
Sovereign Creator
Omnipotent Redeemer
Glorious Lady Wisdom
From everlasting to everlasting
Amen
prayers
A Sunday Prayer
Lady Wisdom, guide me
Mother of all, hold me close
Father of all, protect me
Teacher of all, teach me
Creator God, grant me a share of Your compassionate love
Lady Wisdom, thank You for my faith, troubled though it be
Mother of all, thank You for holding me, even when I feel abandoned
Father of all, thank You for protecting me, even as I wander
Teacher of all, thank You for Your patience, as I forget time and again
Creator God, thank You for all that I am, all that I have, all whom I cherish, all my joys and sorrows, triumphs and difficulties, youth and aging, those lost and those found
God Eternal, accept my praise, though I be like the dust mote praising the sun that makes it sparkle
Amen
Aftermath II
The wind is stilled
The earth is quiet
The fire is quenched
I hear the whispered questions
Who will love justice
Who will carry the burden of injustice
Who will know their own failings
Who will walk on troubled waters
Who will reach for My hand
When sinking with the weight of sin
With the exhaustion of trying
With the failure of understanding
Let me recognize
My privilege
My prejudice
My racism
My failures in love
Let me grasp God’s steadfast love for all
And enduring faithfulness to me. Amen
Love for Your Sake Alone
“…give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace.
Give me humility in which alone is rest,
and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens.
And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love.
Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love,
that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection,
not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity,
but for You alone.”
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Give Peace a Chance
Once I sang in a crowd
Protesting
All we are saying is give peace a chance
Now I pray in private
Protesting
All I am praying is give peace a chance
A Prayer for Help
“It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century’s demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us, and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place.” Joan Chittister
Creator God, help me, please,
To remember
That I am Your child.
Lady Wisdom, help me, please,
To know
That I am an echo of my Creator
And I am more important than what I do.
Redeemer, help me, please,
Do not let me be
too busy to grow,
consumed by products
exhausted by actions.
Amen
Of fruit and tree
“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against such things.” Galatians 5:22-23
The fruit of an apple tree is an apple; as the fruit, so the tree.
So then:
God is loving and joyful
God is peaceful and patient
God is kind and generous
God is faithful and gentle
God is in control
With God:
I can be loving and joyful
I can be peaceful and patient
I can be kind and generous
I can be faithful and gentle
I can let God be in control
Let this be my law
Let this be my life
Amen
A prayer suggested by a Madeleine L’Engle quote
Recently, I found a wonderful article about Madeleine L’Engle’s views on writing.
L’Engle wrote: “The stories I cared about, the stories I read and reread, were usually stories which dared to disturb the universe, which asked questions rather than gave answers.”
And that led me to a prayer:
God, grant me the grace to love the universe,
the courage to disturb the universe,
And the wisdom to ask questions rather than give answers.
Amen
Third Grade Our Father
In 2005, our Vacation Bible School’s theme was the Lord’s Prayer. I taught third grade that year and, over the course of the five days, had my third graders put the Lord’s Prayer into their own words. Here is the result:
Dear daddy God,
I know you live in heaven.
You are very, very special to me – no one else in the world is like you.
I hope that soon we will all live with you and we will all do what you want us to do – all of the time.
Then earth will be just like heaven.
Please take care of me every day.
Forgive me when I hurt You and help me to forgive people who hurt me.
Keep me safe from sin and evil.
You are the Greatest, the Strongest and the Best. Amen
Prayer by Symeon
Years ago, in a seminary course on St. Paul’s letters, I learned that one of the key theological concepts, repeated throughout Paul’s letters is “Christ in me” and conversely “me in Christ.” I have never found a more beautiful expression of it than in this poem/paean/prayer by Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) a Byzantine Christian monk and mystic:
We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
–Then open your heart to Him.
And let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved
In every last part of our body.
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 219-220
I found this in one of Richard Rohr’s Daily Devotions emails.
