A Prayer forJoy Amid Complexity - Week of August 14, 2023
Lover of Joy, you steady us when we are crumbling apart, and help us shake with rejuvenating laughter when it would be easier to do anything but. You do not deny that life can be painful, or grief-full, or angering, or challenging, and you keep singing and signing with us that there is still pleasure, still wonderment, still tiny delights, still moments of connection and relationships that give us back our wings and cheer us on when we soar, flutter, find a new roost. Lover of Joy, help us find and remember the liberation in mundane pleasure, such as the feel and sound and shape of the color green in a monstera leaf, so different from the pleasure of the feel and sound and shape of the color green in that hay-scented fern. Whether our eyes perceive that color as someone believes we “should” or perhaps we were taught, how is it just for us on just this day, fragrant in our nostrils or under fingertips or felt brushing our bodies? Can we dwell inside this spell of pleasure for a few more breaths? How might we share the mundane pleasures we encounter, experience, create? Can we imagine our friend wheeling over next to us and inviting us to hold this scarf they are knitting, and feel that love borne in every stitch, the land turned into twists of fibre, the many, many hands that contribute to this moment of pleasure shared, in a scarf, or a cup of iced tea, or the patter of patois tapped into our being? Lover of Joy, things do not need to be fixed to be well, cured to be well, healed to be well, righted to be well enough. We get to the enough and wellness alongside all the challenges, reasons for anger, losses, illnesses, and pain, not separately from them. We do not buy tickets for transcending being persons in and of this world. Our lifetime passes are for the here and now, in all its complexity, including this joy we can share. Amen.
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