So many hours ago we awoke to this day, for we had been awakened…by the expectancy of good things to come—yes we have hoped all day long—by the urgency to finish what we didn’t get done yesterday, by the terror of our dreams, by the eerie quiet of hallways leading to coffee mugs and eerier headlines, by the patter of a child seeking to be released to Sesame Street…we were awakened and the day began.
This has not been a day without work to do, and nearing its inevitable finish we are mindful that the work is not done. (Yet it must be.)
So we are mind-full. And we are trying to remember the great luxury that is ours in being able to have an agenda, and the greater luxury of being able to keep an agenda. For throughout our great wide world are millions whose lives are being dictated and displaced by someone else’s agenda.
An agenda for war here, one for healthcare there. An agenda for feeding the poor, another (or is it the same?) for starving the rich. An agenda to try and do more, or to try and do nothing. An agenda to figure out which is which.
O God of Impassioned Patience, we would be mindful of those who were awakened today by the sound of bombs or the feeling of hopelessness that stirs from having no job, or no money, or no love.
Gathered at our bedsides we pray you would make us humble enough to feel with our knees and to see in our hearts the pain of all who suffer.
O God, in the name of the One who like a sheep was silent before his shearers so that we would not have to be silent before ours, lift our voices against the blight of self-preservation, and force us beyond all human reservation to seek and seek again such peace beyond understanding.
Prince of Peace who drops nations into buckets, who warns against messing with migrants, widows, and children, in the midst of parties and politics remind us of who we were while we were still in our mother’s womb, that in our helplessness we might reach for mercy and find life.
For we pray in the name of the One whose agenda was full, and then emptied, and then—behold, filled again!—with life, Amen.
PleaseGrace 