a prayer

I have posted a few other prayers here before and hope to do so more regularly. Please feel free to use without attribution in a religious service. If you reproduce online, please link to this blog and include attribution.

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all of all

love of all love, peace of all peace, depth of depth

so often, in the midst of all we do, as we are washing dishes… sending email… going to work… and doing all the things we do day in and day out,

we can forget that our time here on this earth is both a gift and a miracle.

do not let us forget.

because sooner than we think, a tomorrow will come and it will be our last tomorrow and we will have missed the miracle. we will have emailed, and worked, and complained, and watched tv through the miracle.

we will have let the sunrises, the fresh air, the warmth of a bed, the taste of our orange juice, the first snows, and the cricket chirping slip by as we go about doing all of our so important things.

we will have let our pain and struggles and our tasks and achievements and our accumulation of things obscure the enchantment and richness that can be life.

love of all love, peace of peace, depth of depth –

let us find the holy in all that makes up our life.

let us slow down. stop doing. and learn to simply be.

may we find the holy in our coffee, in the spider whose lovely eight legs carry her effortlessly over her web, in the kiss goodnight, in the hot meal, fuzzy blanket, and in the chill of the dark night air. may we be seekers and makers of the holy.

amen and blessed be.

a prayer

For each Sunday service I write a prayer/meditation for service. I think I will start sharing them here. This is for tomorrow, so if you are from FUUSM and don’t want to know the prayer ahead of time, stop reading now.

god whose name is not god,
spirit whose love exceeds our comprehension,
we ask that you are with us as week journey through this life,
through this week.

it is hard to be the person we want to be.
it is hard to be the community that we would like to be.
the work of love and justice often makes for weary souls,
and sometimes broken hearts.

While we know that it is only in learning to be at peace with ourselves that we can be peace within the world…

this is just very hard.

a life imagined and a life envisioned,
is sometimes very different than a life lived.

this morning, we ask for the serenity that we need to love our life as it is.
to find peace in the bumps and challenges and pains and aches and beauty and joy that is all mixed up together.

let us learn and work to focus on those things in our life that we can be grateful for.

let us learn to let the waves of sorrow wash over us, and have the strength and the peace to be washed anew, baptized by the waters of life that are gentle and rough and beautiful and dark all at the same time.

god whose name is not god,
spirit whose love exceeds our comprehension,

be with us as we do that hard work of love and justice.
we seek gratitude for the joys of our life.
we seek comfort for our aches.
we seek love and peace for our souls.

amen and blessed be.

*Please feel free to use in a religious service with no attribution. If you repost online, please include attribution to this blog and a link.