Prayer For Respect

A Prayer for Respect - Week of July 10, 2023

Should I pray to Mercy or to Wisdom? To the Beloved to be beloved or to the Honey in the Rock, starting from that place of surprising possibilities amid difficult times? Mystery and Wonder, I don’t know where to start when spun out by someone else’s disrespect. As they slough off their own distress and dress me in it, what am I supposed to do with this? When others ask me why I permit this behavior, I try to remember when consent was asked and given, knowing in my bones, disrespect erases enough of my humanity so that my consent is not considered necessary. Could we start with consent? That seems to me to be a piece of respect. Wisdom, you know that also requires all of us to have more self-awareness, to notice when we’re gathering up the stuff of our own discomfort so we can dump it on someone else. And then perhaps we can choose? Please, may we make the awareness so we can choose respect, consent, recognition that here, too, is someone else with dreams and fears and vulnerabilities and strengths and so much neither of us can know or imagine without the participation of that other person? Beloved, lead us into the spaces we can meet each other with reverence, with wonder that we are meeting and are here on this earth at this time, with pleasure of today meeting someone whose life might share some aspects of our own and very likely has so many more points of divergence. Honey in the Rock, bring us into joyful surprise as respect increases our abilities to thrive together, to imagine and co-create a more just, equitable, and compassionate world. May we practice self-respect and self-appreciation with self-awareness. May we practice respect for one another, appreciation of one another, awareness of one another in our wholeness, remarkable, mundane, and full of possible joy. Amen.