UniversalistPrayers

Dreaming of a World Made Whole - Enoughness

A Prayer for Dreaming of a World Made Whole: Enoughness

Lover of Each and of All, may we pay attention to who is not accessing enough to thrive: enough love, enough acceptance, enough food, enough peace, enough care, enough clean air or water, enough connection to other beings, enough connection with this earth. May we focus our energies in addressing these problems, on cherishing the children before us, whether we got their gender right at birth or not, whether they love like we do or think like we do or move like we do or perceive the world the ways we do or not. Enoughness is not equivalent to being alike. So why are so many of us acting like we are fundamentally flawed, deeply wanting, will never and can never be enough just because we are different from what is normed, cherished, and defined as better, best, or, enough? Lover of Each and of All, give us courage to meet each day, noticing that we are whole, just as we are, that we have much to learn and much to offer this world, that we belong, just by being here. May we dream of a world in which dignity for each and for all changes our policies and practices, instead of policing schoolroom bookshelves for having texts of affirmation and inclusion, lauding those schoolrooms and bookshelves with their texts of affirmation and inclusion, of their celebration of the many ways to be and still be enough. May we choose to recognize our kinship to one another, and, as kin, learn to be compassionate, learn to accept we live differently and that all that differently can be wonderful and joyful and more than enough for each and for all. Lover of Each and of All, may we dream of a world and then work to create it, where we bring our enoughness into every day and care deeply for each other and this world. Amen.

Dreaming of A World Made Whole with Housing Justice

Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole with Housing Justice

 

Lover of the Birds who have their nests, Lover of the Foxes who have their dens, Lover of the Octopus who has its crevices in the sea, help us dream of a world where we have housing justice, where all belong, and where there are many kinds of home and space for home depending on our differing needs and cultures and ecospheres and communities. May we dream of and wake in the morning to work on housing policies that make room for different housing needs by affordability and accessibility, by our differing disabilities and our differing communities of connection, nourishment, and support. May we dream of, imagine, and make real vibrant housing stock along public transit and with greenbelts and green spaces and community gardens, places so many of us would dream of thriving in and then can create our thriving in a specific place. May we dream of housing that welcomes people fleeing violence and housing that helps us establish new lives of peace and housing that connects us to the wisdom of the ancestors of the land, the ancestors of our communities, the ancestors of how to adapt and thrive in our changing world. May we dream of and enact policies and taxes addressing excess places to live, to support enough places for each and for all. And may we pay attention to whoever is falling through the spaces of communities we create and build and nurture, to make sure no one is left behind or forgotten. Lover of the Birds who have their nests, Lover of the Foxes who have their dens, Lover of the Octopus who has its crevices in the sea, may we become people who are lovers of everyone having a place to call home, to make home, to be home, belonging and thriving together. Amen.

Dreaming A World Made Whole By Food Justice

A Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole By Food Justice - Week of March 12, 2023

Lover of Dreaming, dream with us a world made whole with food justice, where no one hungers and no one thirsts from lack of access to quality food and clean water, where we can practice food sovereignty rather than be indebted to multinational corporations controlling seeds. Dream with us a world full of succulent, delicious, local foodways and enough abundance to share globally to make up for famine, natural disaster, war, and our changing climate. Dream with us a world where we are adapting year by year with the climate, continuing to grow enough to make sure everyone is well nourished. Dream with us a world where the policies that create food scarcity, food insufficiency, food insecurity, are addressed and transformed into policies that nurture enoughness, and that no one, of any age, from our youngest to our smallest, knows hunger. Dream with us, Lover of Dreaming, a world where those who grow, raise, harvest, prepare, transport, sell, and create our food are paid living wages and enjoy safe workplaces that adapt with them over the long haul. Dream with us, a world where enoughness is powered by sustainable and renewable food production processes, and where waste is small and reclaimed and returned to the system to nourish the soils again. Dream with us, Lover of Dreaming, a world made whole and humming with the pleasure of each mouth full and bellyful with food justice, and keep us steady in the innovations, daily efforts, and community creation to make this world real. Amen.

Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole With Gender Justice

A Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole With Gender Justice for week of March 6, 2023

Lover of Dreaming, dream with us a world made whole with gender justice, a world in which a multitude of experiences, understandings and expressions of gender can be honored, and experienced as non-competing and non-erasing of others’ experiences and expressions. Dream with us a world where we can be our fullest selves without shame and condemnation, without risking employment or schooling or family or friendships or incarceration. Dream with us a world where we lift up each other in our gendering differences, rather than dismiss, grind down, regulate, and interfere with each other being who we are. Dream with us a world where school athletics do not demand menstrual cycle records to participate, a world where we worry more about everyone having equitable and clean restroom access than policing restroom use, a world we make safer by making it more celebratory and inclusive of these many ways of being whole, where gender surgery or medications is between an individual and their chosen medical team. Dream with us a world in which we can dress and speak and dance and live without partitioning some major part of ourselves, denying our truth and our being, fighting to be who we are. Dream with us a world in which my experience and yours do not cancel each other, but together with everyone else’s experiences are part of the mysterious, magnificent, wondrous whole. Dream with us a world in which people are paid equally for the same work, regardless of their gender, where people have the same rights and laws regardless of their gender, where gender does not define life opportunities or having a life at all. Dream with us, Lover of Dreaming, a world made whole and joyful with gender justice, and keep us steady in the work of laboring to birth that world into being. Amen.

Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole with Climate Justice

A Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole with Climate Justice

Hello, Beloved, help us make today a better day by choosing climate justice over expedience, by choosing creating room for those in need of refuge, displaced by drought, floods, fires, climate-fueled storms, rising seas, by choosing to bear witness and aid to this world, our home. Hello, Beloved, help us have frank conversations about our choices with each other, wherever we go and are, in the halls of power and in the byways of those disenfranchised and trying to survive. Hello, Beloved, may we have the follow through to plant trees and reforest the earth, to plant mangroves and oyster beds and reestablish coastlines, to stop polluting projects and clean up the waterways and the air, and to shift our economies to those adapting to mitigating and answering and stopping climate change. Hello, Beloved, may we notice how any crisis tends to expose inequities and biases and hatred and raise fears and feed demagoguery, and noticing and knowing that, may we recommit to nurturing equity and dismantling oppressions, and making sure that each and all have enough to thrive. Hello, Beloved, may we dream a world made whole with climate justice, where we live to nurture justice and joy for each, for all, in our amazing ecosystems, in our abundantly diverse cultures and ways of being, in our wholeness as part of this earth. Amen.

Prayer for Dreaming A World Made Whole

A Prayer for Dreaming a World Made Whole - Ash Wednesday, 2023

Lover of Ordinary People and Ordinary Abundant Blessings, may we join You in dreaming a world repaired and healed and full of justice and joy, not just for a few, but for everyone in every land and every sea, wherever one could go, wherever one could find one’s own self. May we dream mighty dreams that ask us to live humbly every day, to gather up our courage alongside everything else we need to meet the day, to recognize our ego needs to be invested in an empowering “we” and “us” of dignity, diverse ways of being, and so, so much joy. Lover of Ordinary People and Ordinary Abundant Blessings, Lover of Ordinary Stardust and Ordinary Clay, Blesser of Breath of Being and Bringer of Beauty and Inviter to Co-Creation, may we choose to honor this life and love with loving the ordinary, the different-from-ourselves, wonder-filled curiosity, and the sweetness of giving, receiving, co-creating blessings. Amen

Prayer for Courageous Hopes

A Prayer for Courageous Hopes

Dreamer of Courage, cloak us in blessed darkness to nurture our hopes for a world of greater equity, a world where economies are adapting to mitigating climate change rather than accelerating it, a world where we treat each other and this earth with dignity and respect, refusing to demonize, dismiss, or destroy trying to remake others and places in our images. Dreamer of Courage, drench us in dreams that quench our thirst for relief from violence, for joyful dances where everyone can be safe and dance in the way that they can, for spaces of peaceful contemplation and renewing wonderment and curiosity, for aching hearts to have witnesses and generous companions along the way. Dreamer of Courage, nourish us each night and each day and help us nourish each other with hopes worthy of co-creating and drawing into being, of new iterations and innovation and of steadying traditions and steadfast presence. Dreamer of Courage, here we are, and may we live into our courageous hopes. Amen.

Prayer for Courageous Love

A Prayer for Courageous Love

Love whisper in our hearts, to help us hold on through trials and tribulations. Love whisper in our hearts and call us back to our essential wholeness, our essential generosity, our essential joy, our essential gifts to bless this world. Love sing to and rock our hearts, to soothe us when we grieve or are afraid. Cradle us in the truth that we grieve because we have lost those and that which is precious and cared for, whether our grief arises from climate change and losing places, or other forms of violence and displacement, or denial of our humanity, or being targeted as not human enough to deserve love and respect. Cradle us knowing our grief is our heart crying “no! no more!” to the violence, the loss, the erasure and gaslighting of our lives and loved ones. Cradle us, knowing our fear is connected to the same threats, and thus, also to the reality that we love enough to be threatened. Love shout with us for justice and for joy, for creating ways that need to be made and remaking traditions that need to be re-rooted, nourished, and grown luxurious and abundant with interbeing and interdependence and generosity and dignity for each and for all. Love shout with us for justice and for joy, for the pleasures of loving and being loved, in community, as friends, as neighbors, as strangers, romantically, as family, as blessings moving through this world in so many astounding and ordinary ways. Love be with us always, encouraging us, calling us home, cradling us, shouting with us, wherever we go and wherever we are. Amen.

Prayer for Body Love and Respect

A Prayer for Body Love and Respect

Lover of Bodies, Lover of variations, differences, disabilities, spectrums, ranges, distinctions, divergences, deviations, adaptations, and contrasting characteristics, You show up every day inviting us to thrive in these bodies, to make our homes in these bodies, to respect each other in our dissimilar and similar bodies. Lover of variety, exult with us in the many ways and cultures we have and can co-create, the many ways of gendering and thinking and moving through the world with joy and justice and generosity and abundant love. Lover of vibrant, thriving, cacophonous life, of the percussion of heartbeat and drums and our bodies in happy motion, welcome us home with each breath and heartbeat, each dance and each whirl or wheel or clap or step or swing that proclaims, “yes, here I am, yes, here we are, yes, to this life, yes, to this home.” Lover of Bodies, teach us each day to love our bodies when they have pain and when they have pleasure, when they are challenged and when they are relaxed, when we are doing and when we are being here and now with no other agenda than to be here in this moment right now. Lover of Bodies, join us in welcoming ourselves home in our large bodies and small bodies and medium bodies, our bodies of many hues and tints, our bodies adorned and decorated and our bodies plainly present. May we be at home in our bodies, and respect each other in theirs. Amen.

 

Prayer of Responsibility

Prayer of Responsibility - Week of January 30, 2023

Wisdom, may we first acknowledge that sometimes responsibility is not fun. Also, sometimes it is. Sometimes responsibility leads to wonderful relationships and meaningful effort. And sometimes responsibility leads to boring and tedious tasks. So, Wisdom, you understand when maybe there are times that responsibility doesn’t sound like a prayer we wish to make. And yet, may we grow in wisdom ourselves to realize that every responsibility is a meaning-making connecting thread that composes the tapestry of our lives, and that large and medium and small, inherited and created in our lifetimes, momentary and enduring, responsibilities are our belonging, our cherishing, our participating, our shaping, our choosing, our being chosen, our creating and co-creating, our dreaming made real with our actions. Wisdom, may we not fall prey to substituting responsibility to feel more powerful or like we have more authority or to accept other people’s work because it is easier to do so or we secretly want to break out the heroic cape in the closet. Wisdom, may we help each other with our responsibilities to care, to choose, to nurture love, equity, justice, compassion, generosity, and all manner of healing and good things in this life together, for the wellbeing of all. Amen.