2022-11-15 A Prayer: Re-center

O Lord, so re-center us each and every day that we pray to You. You give wondrous hopes, anticipated gifts, meaningful dreams. For our imaginations are holy and give tangible meaning. We can feed on our better thoughts. We can thrive on memories or promises or simply a life experience stored up in a bottle. So grant us prayer that re-centers and illuminates You as Lord of our life, granting insane focus on some fronts but insane forgiveness on others. Help us focus on forgiving all who seem to attract our condemnation whether deservedly or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We love You and focus this day on dreams scarcely mentioned before being magnets of hatred; things scarcely brought to the foreground before drawing malice.

So make us people with very simple projects, ones that inspire nonetheless, to do a good turn this day; to emerge from a baptismal “bath” each and every hour in which holy brain waves are lifted towards You. Each and every hour in which we are instead distracted. Each and every hour in which we judge between competing goals. See us so simply appeased, though in an impossible war, still warmed by the fellow’s or gal’s embrace. See such acts begin to be a list of healing words, gestures, storylines that comfort.

Make us attracted to a satiated, indulged, comprehensive kind of Mercy: the joy of seeing the flipside of evil; the peace of reckoning with literal demons and sin; the exchange You were most obsessed with when You went to a Cross, giving us meaningful messages out of Your suffering. We know that all our trials are familiar to You, because of Your suffering. Things emerge somehow blessed.

See ample love in our hearts for Good Causes and Good Purposes. But see us wandering and distracted. See a loudness that deals out time wasted, elapsed hours, until we come plainly again before You; see us wondering if we even know quite where we stand. See all that because of living in a mentalist’s, strangely psychedelic, Encounter, a prayer-life that re-centers, an opposition to all things unredeemed and plain obstacles. So we see on our calendar the call to Pray; to call to Re-center; the call to let distractions and unforgiveness be cast off. That is what is on the docket for today. And though sane and aware, still we see worldviews at loggerheads, and manifest call to be equipped for the day’s battle.

Turn our dregs of thought into redeemed and healing, astonishing, Recognition. See us Recognize, You, Peace, Life-source, Hope for tomorrow. See us find You in the unwanted and the unforgiven. Where we try to appease, help us know that regardless of our fellow’s or gal’s assessment of us, that before You we are New Creations: the old has passed away. Their qualms are precisely that: like a spouse or (false) friend who judges their partner but not themselves. We know ourselves rightly so to be forgiven, even if we also, as a nightmare that amounted to nothing, recall that flipside of the mercy. So help us believe that such Truth will be conveyed, even when we feel very tried and tired and guilty.

See us burst forth with a Mission unto the very foundations, to heal and to be healed, in excitement that no material prescription can cultivate. See our totems of ingestion, our so-called medications and foods, simply secondary to a Spiritual High, along with a Spiritual Sobriety of thought; we can make do in any hour, tired, awake, calmed, rested, eager. So do give us over to pray in tandem with all other people, to reclaim that inheritance You have spelt out for us in the Call to go forth and thrive. The times they afford sanctuary, even though we be tired. Even though the hours pass by, and the rest time is sparse. At least, of some spiritual variety, we pray for sanctuary.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.