A prayer for these cruel times

This week I’m feeling sad and quiet and like what I have to offer you is the prayer, I myself, really need. I hope it helps you take a deep breath and think some thoughts you need to think or feel some feelings you need to feel. Thanks for what you’re doing to stay grounded and awake to what is happening.

Gorgeous piece by Jen Bloomer of Radici Studios.

Let us put our bodies in places where they can create more peace and safety for other people’s bodies.

Let us not turn away from what is happening in the world, in our own country, in our own towns because it overwhelms us. Let us instead learn to titrate what we take in and become every more intentional about trusted, wise sources. Let us listen to first-hand accounts, return to original documents, take time to digest what we are learning before re-posting, concluding, getting high on groupthink outrage.

Let us understand that our sadness, our anger, our disappointment, our fear, our anxiety are personal and political emotions and they all make perfect sense in these deeply imperfect times.

Let us approach the processing and activation of these emotions with creativity, collaboration, and humility. Who is already doing what? How can we join? What isn’t being done that needs to be done, that aligns with your unique gifts and resources?

Let us be free from over-abstraction.* Let us know that images on social media of people injured, suffering, dying, being taken away from their families, are real people—every single person as complex and real as your own favorite person who sits across from you at the table chewing with their mouth open or walks beside you on your favorite stretch of sidewalk.

May I recommend holding your red-haired nephew by a river? It’s very nourishing. And every child is as real as he is to me.

Let our dinner table conversations—especially with our children and elders—be filled, not just with the outrage, but with the models of moral action we have seen in our midst, the non-political delights that will nourish us to keep us going, the humility of searching questions.

Let us feel the beautiful sound inside of us of our own genuine knowing about what is unacceptable, what we will stand up for with courage and grace and a crystal clear and calm NO. Always alongside others who are hearing that same beautiful sound inside of themselves. Let us encourage our children to honor the sound inside themselves. (It is probably loudest for them and is mostly a matter of not letting us and other adults muffle their knowing.)

Let us befriend limitations so we might consume less, do less, breathe more, stay clear-headed because we are not too busy to see that our country needs us, that the world needs us, that our people need us, to be awake and noticing and feeling right now.

Let us give and receive help in a sacred circle of being fully human. Let us understand that our bodies and hearts are tired because these are tiring times, and we need to slow down and rest and rely on others to keep moving while we are resting. There are seasons and cycles and restoration and action must interweave. Let us not expect others to save democracy on our behalf and let us not expect to save democracy on behalf of anyone else.

Let us read books and make notes in the margins, to deeply engage with work that has been created by deeply engaged people.

Let us retrain our nervous systems to use our phones as tools, but not traps of our attention.

Let us get weirder and weirder as AI creates ever more predictable patterns.

Let us turn to one another. Let us make ourselves proud with our priorities. Let us dream of a different, more tender, more principled world.

This congregational commitment from our UU church might as well just stand in for the whole damn world, really.

*This line was inspired by a “Declaration of the Rights of the River Cam” that I read about in Is a River Alive? The idea of “over-abstraction” took my breath away.

Please add your prayers below!