"Prayers of the Community"

A Prayer by Marion Allaart
February 21st, 2010

 

Divine and Loving Presence

 

We've gathered together to contemplate 'the way of the open heart' and are attuning ourselves to the Wisdom beautifully woven through the reading, the anthem and the sermon.

 

How sweet it is to set our lives aside for one hour and celebrate the space created here to deepen our connection to each other and in a way with people all over the world who are doing likewise that we might receive the Spirit of the living God.

 

We open to your healing power - that takes the tattered pieces of our daily lives and leads us to harmony and wholeness.

 

It's been said "we are called to a Big Love''.  And today, on the day of rest, we keep our minds and hearts on Your love, both your love for us and the love You would have us share with each other.  We are placed on this earth to love away the pain of the world yet we cannot do that when we ourselves are living at the effect of it.

 

We can be like birds who have forgotten they have wings, kings and queens who've forgotten our royal line.   We feel caught by temptations and conditions that should have no power to confine us and powerless before forces over which we have been given dominion.

 

There is a part of us that is clear that the time to show up fully for life is right now, whatever the circumstances.  Help us to understand that the decision to be divine attracts the divine.  Raise our courage when, left to our own devices, we would shrink; guide us to find ever more scope for the faith we've begun and more focus for the commitment we've made;  in You we will find the frame where that commitment sets us free.  It is truly a miracle when we realize "who we are!"

 

Our City is intensely alive and abuzz with the continuing XXI Olympiad, Chinese New Year, Annual Women's March and Red Tent Campaign that keep our attention both on celebration and on important ongoing issues of missing women and homelessness in our city.

 

There is splendour & excitement, colour & fanfare & bustle; the dicey dance of demonstration & event traffic, the anticipation & expectation & myriad other emotions that these many events evoke in us - all intensified with the eyes of the world on every bit of it.  Help us to hold it all and balance all.  (Pause)

 

We ask that you ease the pain and shock of the broken hearted and those who are deeply grieving – we remember the Georgia team and the family of Nodar Kumaritash-vili, his family, friends and all-the-watching-world .  Hold them in your loving arms.  We pray they know you're near.

 

Be with all who face deep life change, all kinds of health challenges and worry, addictions, poverty and money concerns, unemployment, family and marital discord, uncertainty and doubt.  Hear our prayers over trouble spots in our world and particularly this morning a mention of my homeland the Netherlands and the fall of the Dutch government.  Give us all the courage to be with what's so, comfort and keep us.  Save us from the despair & resignation that are so easy to slip into &  lead us back to life. 

 

We raise our constant gratitude for this giving & living community and the time we share;  and for abundant  & mysterious gifts of creation.

 

May we be a light to those we meet as we set forth on the week ahead of us.  And let us say together and take with us the prayer Christ taught us - letting the words seep into our very being.  

 

(In the words Jesus taught his followers, in an interpretation by Rev. Bruce Sanguin)

 

 
Loving Presence, luminous in all creation,
hallowed be your name.
Thy Kin-dom come.
May we reflect on earth
the yielding perfection of the heavens.

Help us to receive
an illumined measure from the earth this day.
Forgive us when we trespass against others,
human and other-than-human,
as we forgive others who trespass against us.

Keep us on the path of wisdom
when we are tempted to take the selfish path.
May it be your rule we follow,
your power we exercise
and your radiance that allures.

May this be the truth that guides our lives,
the ground from which our future will grow,
until we meet again.

Amen.