Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!
from the Mishkan T’filah, A Prayer for Shabbat
The Man’s Prayer: “I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.”
Prayed at Possum Lodge meetings on the Red Green Show (S&S Productions, CBC Television)
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted in Sojourners, April 2011
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
Evening Prayer II, Book of Common Prayer, 1979, The Daily Office, p. 124
O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Order for Compline, Book of Common Prayer
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
Honore De Balzac
If you go to war pray once; if you go on a sea journey pray twice; but pray three times if you are going to be married.
Russian proverb
Lord, make my words tender and sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
traditional prayer
More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates”
He whom I bow to knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
C. S. Lewis, “A Footnote to All Prayers” (1934)
Our real journey is interior.
Thomas Merton, Abbey of Gethsemani (Trappist)
Joy is the grace we say to God.
Ray Bradbury, as related to his biographer, Sam Weller
Let us not just say it, let us make it be.
unremembered
First of all, let us not misunderstand the nature of prayer, particularly in Jewish tradition. The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose of prayer is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song and men cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved. Prayer is not requesting. There is a partnership of God and men. God needs our help.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
March 2011: God of Rock and Sea, watch over our brothers and sisters on Honshu Island who are suffering and afraid and hungry. Calm their fears, and your rocks, show the brave warriors in the power plants how to put out the fires, start the healing. I guess I’m confused and pissed right now and trying to see grace in all of this. Could you help my brothers and sisters see the grace in all of this???
windshepherd 