2022-11-29 A Prayer: A Living Being

O Lord, a living being, we are blessed without plan nor foresight of how to bless ourselves; help us to major in the majors; help us to remain steadfast; see that plain acts of service do reciprocate, making us better people for dwelling close to that living, breathing, being’s heart. So educate us and give us foresight as to what is plain goodness, forgetting our own sins that hinder and that intrude, that raise unholy hackles, offended, accused, and unworthy.

Help us know One Thing, and to be steadfast, uncompromising. If that thing be some prophetic insight, some reflection on our own passionate dark night of the heart, the fruit of hallucinatory, sleepless early morn, the first light, the soul’s distance from itself, removing, peering at ourselves from above, heartened and steadfast.

No formula suffices, but we sense wide field and Call, to serve in simple ways yet ways majoring in the majors, forgetting the quibbles and the patent discomforts, the personal tendency to judge, the frustration at the habitual patterns or sins of others. So grant us to be Love and Mercy, to be Justice and Peace, to have untold confidence that simple Love unmediated does raise up a generation who is servile and workable, who are shaped and fashioned through no address of ourselves, but through the heart’s reciprocal love: when loved, loving in return. When formed, then possessing character and shape of its own. When possessed of expansive, safe, horizons then benign and jolly in the company of others, leaders, instances of love’s fruits.

We know not how to pray as we ought. Simply to capitalize on so much You have given us, such modesty of purpose, such humility of posture, such innocence as to Sin, innocent of deeper transgressions, the fruit of repentance; grant us courage and enthusiasm that all these things are coming together. Grant us to give thanks for any avenue in which to serve. Grant us a heart for the poor and poor in spirit, not scared nor fleeing, but belonging, an oddball in the mixture but fully engaged by the Love present. So see us try to put to paper what any holy gathering does flex and work wonders towards the community.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.