Mercy and Compassion as the comfort of darkness descends, open our hearts and encourage us in being people of peace who open doors and seek out the way of welcome. In the night let us attend to one another’s stories, to the ways we have given, wondered, been troubled, and been changed. Heart by heart, may we meet holy surprise in forgiveness, in forgiving, in acceptance, in encouragement, and in love. Our thanksgiving is not limited by day or night. Our wonder at this life is in every season. From gratitude and from awe, let us travel the ways of peace together. Amen.
02/03/2012
Morning Prayer February 5, 2012
Mercy and Compassion, sustain us wherever we find ourselves today. Mercy and Compassion, you know our own failings and struggles, our celebrations and our sorrows, the ways we risk faithfully in courageous love. Welcome us back to our true hearts, to be kinder than may be cool, to be generous when we are feeling buffeted by demands, to forgive when we would rather turn away. Meet us in the place of wonder, in the moments of true gratitude, and in the ways we can help in mercy and in love. Amen.
Morning Prayer February 4, 2012
Blessed Abundance of Life, today may all of us who hunger have enough, all of us who yearn for shelter be welcomed in, all of us who meet cruelty and endure hatred meet changed hearts and diverse communities of equality, dignity, and love. Each day may we all enjoy the wonders of this life and add to them with our own gifts, especially those that grow out of our own struggles. Lover of Life, laugh with us with generous joy; weep with us with generous care. And in every hour, sustain our hopes and dreams and attend our thanksgiving, our love, and our hearts. Amen.
Evening Prayer February 4, 2012
Blessed is the thicket, one that gives shelter from the owl and the hawk, sweet nectar for the quiet butterflies and bees, a multitude of life made possible in a thick tangle. Lover of Life, help us appreciate and work with the thicket of our lives, when to seek shelter and when to give our gifts, how to live in thanksgiving and in wonder all our nights and days. Teach us in our different ways of being how to truly live and thrive in merciful justice, in bold generosity, and in courageous love. Lean with us into the difficulties, ease with us the suffering we meet, sustain us in the hard word of reconciliation after the suffering we have caused and inherited. Dance with us in the joys, bear with us the cup of mercy and let us know well too the sweetness of receiving mercy, and guide our hearts in finding the way of peace, the way of hope, and the way of steadfast love. Amen.
02/02/2012
Evening Prayer February 3, 2012
Blessed Wonderment teach us to attend to this astounding life and creation with joyful care. Guide us in appreciating how much we are part of the whole, how our actions affect and are affected by this living earth. Teach us not to pray for wider territories and conquest, but to pray to know the geography of our souls, our heart’s true home, and to honor and respect others’. Help those of us who have been made homeless and exiled, those cut off from the roots to become part of where we now find ourselves, to create a new place of blessing and new community. Help those of us who feel we have our place in the world by merit to appreciate the limits of what we can do on our own, and to work with those who have less to build a community of merciful justice. Blessed Wonderment, wherever we go, however we find ourselves, you have gifted us with the responsibility to attend, to give thanks, to work and faith differently together, and to be bearers of mercy and love. Amen.
Morning Prayer February 3, 2012
Most Merciful and Most Compassionate you have told us of the blessing of the way being made to bring us home. You have told of us a wonderful way to return those of us living in exile to community, those of us bereft and alone to be rewoven into the whole, the barriers keeping us apart coming down, the steep places made plain so that all may travel. What a blessing the work of transforming love and merciful justice is! May we be of use in the labor of love creating this way, bringing down barriers of shame and suffering, making, with you, a more possible way of love from what was once impossibility. Guide our hearts and our deeds, our dreams and our conversations. Attend to our gratitude for the good work and for the journey, for the promise, and for how we are changed in such wondrous love. Amen
02/01/2012
Morning Prayer February 2, 2012
Peace sing your sweet songs in every land and teach them to every heart. Let compassion spring up in more than one billion times one billion forms, in ways more numerous than the stars, more numerous than the grains of sand upon the earth. Strengthen up in the ways of steadfast love and give us heart to heal, to make amends, to seek forgiveness, to forgive and to reconcile. Let the whole earth sing these songs of peace and live in the many diverse ways of steadfast love, growing together in wonder, hope, and joy. Amen.
Evening Prayer February 2, 2012
Generosity and Mercy let me not be lured so easily in iniquity, with wanting approval or with wanting things. If I am to be hooked, let me hooked on serving goodness with steadfast love. Strengthen my heart when I am swimming in a sea of wanting, when the great vast emptiness stretches inside my own spirit. Strengthen my heart to swim with gratitude toward the safety of faithful risk, to the place where I can best give the gifts I have, to a community of other prayerful swimmers seeking to live in generosity and mercy all their days. Giving thanks, let us live in steadfast love, tending to easing suffering, to healing the desecrated and the broken, to giving what we have to give with wonder and with joy. Amen.
01/31/2012
Evening Prayer February 1, 2012
Lover of Life grant me the faith of a moorhen seeking an evening nest, near the care of another who accepts and encourages, living fully in every moment and not shrinking back from the splendors of each night and day. When another calls for help, may I answer freely and quickly. When I am in need, may another quickly and freely answer me. What a gift faithful community and steadfast love are! Strengthen us in what we share, encourage us in understanding and being grateful for our differences. Help us bear your gifts into this world and do what we can to aid Your abundant blessings. Amen.
Morning Prayer February 1, 2012
I reach up and out for the light of love like the flowers reach for morning, leaning into the growing sun, grateful for this new day. Lover of Life you reach out to us with such joy and deep affection, my heart cannot help but laugh and dance and give thanks. Help us all learn such joy in reaching out through steadfast love, that we might cease being strangers, cease living as enemies, and by forgiveness, care, and attention practice true hospitality. Teach to keep our hearts wide open, to risk vulnerability faithfully, to risk loss so we might love more mightily. And when we wonder how we can possibly keep on with the risk of steadfast love, help us remember Your abiding grace. Amen.
Rev. Naomi King
Unitarian Universalist preacher, pirate, knitter, and lover of life!
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