2022-11-19 A Prayer: Clarion Light
O Lord, grant dignity where we have hurt others, where others through no fault of any of us, are suffering Your wounds. See very fresh stuff, Gospel truth, plain charisma and hastening unto holy place and poise; some seem unable to avoid the clarion Call into Your light, where, witnessing, they are persecuted. See us too effective in the world as regards our sins, and too weak in the world as regards our goodness. Help us to give thanks for those times of quiet and of composure, away from persecution internal and external. See how the nefarious doubts try to take from us dignity and composure, to take from Your people resolve and firm manner. Grant us to dwell in unapproachable light as far as the hidden gems that hold our faith and our secret attention. See plainly that some find in Scripture that any one of us can deny; any one of us is in a whirlwind tour of this life; any one of us is crazily called to devotion and service.
Grant us peace, who face down confusion and attention deficit and simple fears that our worse angels may be on the make, rather than our better angels. See us happy and proud that these our better angels do glimmer in momentous and heaven-sent light. See us attested to by friend and peer: this one faced down a truckload. Of evil spirits. Of thoughts most convenient, but unloving. Of ambition and desire for control. Of hatred for the gesture to ones blighted and uniquely poised, poised as sufferers for the sake of the Gospel. Lord, we are cynical and see all the world give way to naked aggression and ambition, but also we have faith and are repaid for our faith.
All of us face trials and sufferings, but also we thrive in those windows of opportunity and love. Help us thus to know the strange logic of the spiritual life, and therein to Rise Up when hindered. Help us be simply supplicant, taking trust fall; no demons awakened if no sinful weakness gives opening. See us not with all the answers, but encouraged in this hour really to learn from a holy appeal, as to how You operate. See that You shelter us even as sinners.
Forgive the manifest misunderstandings, where entire cultures clash with other cultural expectations; grant language, in the study of other cultures, to have a faith that says, they too have holiness, they too have Your manifestation as Person and Leader. They too have a substratum alive and progressive, salvific, motoring along. All this as a mystery does magnify You and draw us to You, who no longer judge but greet each other in happiness, and with purpose.
We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.