Jonathan's Book of Prayers
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PRAYERS
CHANGE
At times our minds spin, when unfamiliar thoughts and un imagined possibilities are presented to us: it is as though we are far from home and want to go back to that which is safe and known. Help us not to lose courage on life'sjourney of surprises and may we be ever adventuring, ever conceiving, ever hoping and ever giving birth to tomorrow's dreams.
WISDOM
Again and again we mistake our prejudices for eternal truths and imprison others in our folly. Help us excavate the rocks of platitude and dogma to uncover the rich seam of wisdom which runs deep throughout all our traditions and sparkles with insight and innovation
PEACE
In the midst of the outrageous lead us in peace. In the face of dereliction grant us your piece. In the presence of sinister forces and vile happenings strengthen our peace. When our souls know despair and our belief is suspended, replenish our peace. When we can take no more, tired of this world's evil and our own, forever renew our peace, and in that peace, the faith to know that God is love and in that love is promise and healing and hope for all.
HONESTY
Our world and our lives are filled with a thousand prevarications and pretence. Truth is camouflaged and openness resented. Our eyes are down cast as we muddle through the shadows. Help us release the captive doves of truth that they may fly free and in their flight raise our eyes to see the splendour of the light and the glory of the open skies and in that inviting space find new ways of reconciliation and understanding.
HOME TRUTHS
At times even we become tired and disenchanted with our excuses, our reasons, our justifications. Help us to be brave enough to accept that we were wrong, an action was flawed, a choice mistaken, a life-style inconsistent; Encourage us to step aside from all the campaigning about others to look closely into the mirror at ourselves and may change at home become the catalyst to help us change the world.
HUMOUR
How serious we are, with our earnest faces and stubborn convictions. Oh how pompous we are without even realising it. Help us to be able to laugh at ourselves and the ridiculous nature of our lives and the fragility of our perceptions and beliefs. Help us to enjoy the divine joke played upon us when we were made and learn to relax in the music of mirth.
HAPPINESS
The only gold which is worth its weight is the gold of happiness born of love. Yet the dazzle of wealth allures us into frenzied work, into obsessive gambling into ruthless practices, into an array of blind alleys and dead ends. Rescue us from gold fever and help us instead to draw deeply from the wells of compassion and care, that our happiness may be eternal and its presence a blessing to the world.
HOSPITALITY
The world is our home and every country a room and every village a table at which to share our food and our lives. Teach us the beauty of that love which make space for every one, takes care of everyone and leaves no one out in the cold. Help us to share our family treasures with others and to open our hearts to the stranger's wisdom and the foreigner's grace.
HOPE
Perhaps this is the hardest climb. So much to pull us down, so many falling rocks and so steep the path. Strengthen us when all our energy has gone, all of our reserves depleted. Carry us then a while, but may we never lose that longing to touch the edge between earth and sky and standing upon the summits of our journey to scan the world from heaven's view and breathe the air of freedom and raise our hands high in praise and joy.
CHILD'S PLAY
Watching from above the folds of time you see as we play our senseless games. Turning our neighbour from enemy to friend to enemy depending on the dice of our fragile perceptions. Help us by as children playing more innocent games in the park of this world, and may our tears for the past nourish the flowers of hope we plant in the present.
PATIENCE
You know our struggle in coping with time and how unbearable we find delay; the slow torture of having to contain the desire for knowledge or action. Help us to learn the grace of patience in situations outside our control. Then may we be ready, when wisdom invites us, to choose delay as we wait for hope to blossom.
SURVIVAL
You understand the dreads and dark shadows which stalk our minds and the dreams which disturb us. Yet you plant within us all the will and the means to survive, to cope with whatever life brings. Give us courage for our journey, a belief in ourselves and a profound hope that nothing will ever completely destroy.
VISION
You watch us trudging along, looking only to the ground, following the well trodden paths in the hope of arrival and yet so often finding ourselves in the place of despair. Instil in us the wisdom to know when to pause on our journey, when to look far and wide and when to cut a new path with hope towards the place of promise we have visited in our dreams.
TRANSFORMING
May we remove the poison of violence from our lives; the words and the ways of aggression, the shattering and the splintering. Help us refine the crude oil of our raging into an energy for life. No more the darkness, our faces towards the light, hearts brimming with hope, awaiting the dawn. Opportunity is ever upon us.
CREATION
You made soil to be dirty and excrement to be unpleasant. However, from the fertilised earth springs tomorrow's fresh clean harvest. As we learn to grow hope, help us to expect and cope with dirty hands and soiled lives. May we become good farmers wasting nothing, recycling everything, cultivating an abundant crop.
JOURNEY TOWARDS THE LIGHT
As we seek to live hopeful lives, prepare us for those who would bring us dismay and gloom, laughing at our innocence and pouring scorn on our quest. In contrast may our own hope be as a river whose source never runs dry. May we be eager in our pursuit of happiness and unbowed in our dealing with obstacles. May nothing and no one ever be able to obstruct our journey towards life and light.
STILLNESS
God of the quiet places I am alone. No noise of fevered movement now obscures that truth. The silence is a mirror in which I see myself and all that is, in awesome focus. God of the quiet places give me courage to watch a while until the mirror becomes a window of understanding and I can begin to learn about why and how and what might be.
FEELINGS
God of our tears and our laughter, our feelings are the colours which spread rainbows across the world. They lead us to aspire to love's excellence, yet also hatred's demeaning. Together they bring the sun and the rain, life's promise and pain. Help us to be aware of the changing climate within our hearts and to channel every feeling carefully for the common good.
WOUNDING
God of our wounding, to live is to be hurt, is to die. Involvement and encounter spell risk and danger. Yet somehow our disabling opens a door way to the company of the broken. In the telling of conflicts past and present and in the bearing of our wounds, may a common resolve emerge to tread softly on tomorrow's paths; in knowing our pain may our desire be to visit only peace upon our neighbour.
HEALING
God of our healing, with damaged wings we fly home, returning to the place of our security, each to our own protected nest. Help us to discover the security of love's home found in those around us and carried within us so that our damaged wings can be mended as we fly and as we practise together the art and grace of healing.
THE PAST
O God of ages, the past so often haunts us, bearing our weakness and displaying our folly; ignominious and corrupt, moments of madness fossilised, immutable, immovable, for all to see. Grant us, patient God, the humility to look at all our yesterdays with honest and searching gaze, the courage to learn lessons and gather wisdom and the commitment to face today and tomorrow with the zest to live loving and just lives.
NATURE'S GLORY
In shimmering light, fishtail, peacock's feather, burnished leaf; brushstrokes of divine beauty, in wise and graceful manner, these are God's gifts to us. Holy God, we are surprised. Why did you allow our hands to hold, handle, harm and hurt this precious world of your creating. As children forlornly realising that they were too young and too wilful to know how to handle their broken gift, so we turn to you, our world fragmented. Cleanse, we pray, our soil, lave the skies, purify the waters, freshen the air and lustrate our souls until our beautiful blue planet, teeming with life and promise, is placed again in our hands, now matured through the experience of the ages.
NEW LIFE
Oh God of irrepressible hope, you walk amidst the debris of our vanities and lament over our tortured and torturing lives. Give us grace to take the material of our weakness and to build carefully a new world arising from the old. Rescue us from the alluring sentiments of cynicism and apathy. As the tiniest shoot emerges from the barren soil, so may we be found arising from the desert with the promise of a harvest.
LOVE
God of mystery, you are far beyond are telling and the tales of our imagining; far beyond the doctrines and the dogmas of our believing. When we try and trap you inside, you are outside. When we claim you as our own, you are anothers. When in fear, we shut you out, you are found within. When in anger we blame and accuse and judge our neighbour, we only condemn ourselves and blaspheme your name. Your love embraces all and loses no one. Your care extends to every person and all things.In such love is our cherishing and our peace, and in such love may we journey on in hope.
COMPASSION
O thou gentle and powerful one, in whom our hopes and dreams are vested. We wander the earth and trammel the soil in search of a home and harvest. May we who are well housed and well nourished open wide our doors and our pantries. May we who are languishing for love and tenure find embracing arms and familial care. So that the eyes of the stranger become our windows into heaven and our compassion for all the very pathway to eternal life.
NIGHT
God of the twilight, when all is done and life's raging, rending and restoring are spent; then the stillness. Evening folding up our cares and nudging us towards sleep, the place of dreams; dreams which are a mirror and a window too. As we surrender ourselves to the darkness may the images of night help us to focus and understand anew, that on the morn we might travel well the unravelling day of days.
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