January 18: Yearning for Beloved Community Prayer

How we yearn for a nobler world than what we know today!

How we yearn for greater understanding of what in us is true!

How we yearn to live for each other in a new community of love and justice!

How we yearn to build all these things and more for a better tomorrow.

And yet we face the darkest times many of us have ever seen—

times that call out for grieving and lamenting what is lost,

times that call out for committed action more than honeyed words,

times that terrify us and challenge us to face reality, no matter how grim.

Our task is to hold both our aspirations and our fears, together,

not in despair or in denial but in the knowledge that hope *will* return—

the knowledge that hope *always* returns, even when we can’t imagine it.

Let us take a moment of silence in this place of love and justice and hope

to hold in each other’s presence our most profound aspirations,

as well as our deepest apprehensions and fears.


Together, may we create the Beloved Community,

In which all people are valued and are free.

May we seize this moment and recognize it as an opportunity

to act for the good of all, despite the fear and hatred around us.

And may we remember that even the tiniest flame

can illuminate the vast darkness surrounding it.

Amen!

Popular posts from this blog

January 1: I Shall Write Each Day

As long as mind and body allow, I shall write each day. As much as we attempt to put time into a box or straighten it into a line, the circle keeps going round, propelling the spiral of my life ever outward until the final revolution, which, even then, may not be the end. Unless and until gyrations cease, I shall write each day. And maybe every now and then something beautiful may emerge, something healing, something that sings and shouts and cries.
Read more

January 30: Awfully Cold

The minus sign in front of today’s temperature in degrees Fahrenheit seems like a judgement as much as a measure, as if the thermometer were saying that it’s so awfully cold, we can’t place it on the acceptable range of measures, can’t imagine how it relates to anything like normality. But the weather, uncaring, goes on, utterly heedless of our ability to cope with it.
Read more

January 27: Subzero

After the storm brought a foot of snow, frigid temperatures have set in—not just freezing but subzero weather that seeps through cracks and creeps in through gaps around windows and doors and changes how we live, how we move and breathe. I marvel at how something that is so far beneath our usual standards of measure— something that is less than nothing at all— can have such a profound effect on us.
Read more