UniversalistPrayers

Prayer for Earth Bailout

Breath of Being, as we breathe, we might not notice the nanoplastics accumulating in our lungs and nostrils, but help us remember they are there. Well of Liberation, as we drink this cool water, we might not notice the microplastics and forever chemicals pervading our waterways, but help us remember they are there. Lover of Life, we have inherited this mess of climate change and pollution, been party to, even without our consent or knowledge, to this massive desecration of the home where we live, where so many live. Mercy and Compassion, may we make way for climate change refugees and migration driven by political instability and collapsing economies because of how damaged our planet is. Imagine with us, Great Dreamer, of what it is to put the healing and repair of this planet at the center of our lives, our economic policies, our laws, our honoring of sacred places especially when they are not our sacred spaces. Courageous Love, rise with us every day to long labor to draw us from where we are right now to where we can be, to a planet transformed not only by our disdain and extraction, but by our care and reverence and healing to be abundant and splendid and supportive of each and of all. Amen.

 

A Prayer for Responsible Dissent

Lover of Diversity and apparently Appreciator of Arguments and Imagination and the Very Long Work of Peacemaking, may we learn how to practice dissent responsibly. That is, dissenting as a matter of conscience without causing more violence and with offering and imagining a shared way forward that improves life for everybody, except maybe those committed to cruelty. Teach us how to dissent when laws are unjust and outlaw us living into our own long traditions of ethics and spiritual teachings. Teach us how to dissent to create possibilities and embed them into history and memory that future generations can hold onto and help shift us into greater responsibility toward the earth and one another, greater equity, greater opportunities for all to thrive. May we nurture our imaginations not with revenge, self-righteousness, or bloodshed, but with figuring out peace that nurtures the earth, that allows our differing cultures and faiths and communities to live and thrive side by side, interdependent and together. May we be responsible with our freedoms of thought, speech, and argument, these freedoms that need us to root our words and deeds and build the future from facts, from inclusivity, from addressing injustices and dismantling oppressive laws and practices, and from learning from one another, from the best and most uplifting of our histories, cultures, and traditions. Teach us to dissent in ways that grow a better future not just for some, but also for those we have not yet thought about or remember also belong here. Amen.

Prayer to Be Thoughtful

Slow me down, Wisdom, when, following fear or anger or helplessness, I want to rush to agreeing or disagreeing. Teach me with each breath to be thoughtful, to notice how my emotions are being charged by rhetoric and directed by habits and learned patterns to add to the mess. Breathe with me, Wisdom, and help me find the real problems we can work together on, the stuff providing the raw material for why fear and anger and helplessness are abundant. Breathe with me, Wisdom, and help me think with others, those who have different beliefs and lifeways and cultures and yet here we are sharing the same root problems. May we realize that rhetoric does not provide answers to the problems, even as it may direct the feelings that result from them. And, in that realizing, may we return to the problems to work on them together, even though that makes for fewer soundbites, agitates fewer people, and nurtures a better shared life in our communities and world. May we let go of the pleasure of feeling justified as an “us” against a “them” and turn to the effort of understanding, of respecting one another, of finding ways to live fruitfully and joyfully together, not again, but for the now and for the future. Amen.

Prayer to Nurture Civility and Counter Violence

 

Well of Liberation, grant us gathering spaces where we can nurture, learn, teach, relearn the skills of genuine curiosity, dissenting without needing our neighbors and friends to agree with us to know we are loved and lovable and for them to affirm we are still neighbors and friends. May we imagine together what wondrous possibilities open if we can find small actions to share together and learn how to trust one another. Centuries of learning how to be suspicious will not be undone in one deed, or by one vow, but just as harm was a cascade turning into a flood, we can make a different, liberating flow. Well of Liberation, may we lean into loving more boldly, so we can counter fear and the pleasures of the power of fear with kindness and justice making and healing and building equity and nurturing love and all the pleasures that those powerful forces bring. May we persist with one another, countering falsehoods, inviting truth finding, creating projects that benefit this earth and one another, making a peaceful, creative way where one seems so unlikely without more stubborn violence. Well of Liberation, gather us together, and let us learn with humility and with compassion, with hearts that love deeply how to nurture civility and a better future. Amen.

Prayer to Be with Knotty Issues

Wisdom, breathe with us. Breathe with us in long, slow, calming breaths even as click-bait flashes across our screens promising us if we are living right, no knotty issues will bother or inconvenience us every again. Breathe with us in long, slow, calming breaths even as those who are quite happy to make the tangles and snarls tighter jeer and chitter and even try to tell us that those constrictions and struggles will deliver us to some better time. Wisdom, breathe with us in long, slow, calming breaths even as we and others want to give up, put the knotty issues down, and turn away, pretending they are not so bad, or difficult, or somehow will soften and undo themselves with time. Breathe with us, Wisdom, in long, slow, calming breaths as we try to find a way and then try again and keep trying collectively because in these knots are people’s lives and wellbeing and dignity, and so worthy of our efforts, our patience, our ingenuity, and our persistence. Wisdom, breathe with us in long, slow, calming breaths until we co-create a future that brings blessings and joy, healing and amends, and invites us all to dance. Amen.

Prayer to Free Us of Harmful Beliefs

 

Lover of Diversity, may we acknowledge the harm and wrong-doing that is carried over history and over beliefs we may have learned and made part of ourselves. Help us name, understand, and change these beliefs that may set up some people as being better than others because of how we or they look, we or they think, we or they move, we or they communicate, we or they live, pray, and thrive. Help us release harmful beliefs that teach us to oppress ourselves and others, such as the idea that there is one narrow range of body shape or size appropriate for all, or the idea that some eye colors are more beautiful and some are less, or the idea that health is proof of virtue. Lover of Diversity, we are here in so many amazing cultures, variations in human expression and thriving, understanding and devotion. Teach us to spend more time appreciating one another and supporting each other to living meaningful and joyful lives and less hypercritical and judgmental ones about stuff that may not be in our influence or control or has been a way of causing historical and current harm. Invite us each day to breathe with as much freedom as we can, making it so for one another, freedom to love, to create, to live well in or myriad ways of being. Amen.

Prayer for Dignity

Beloved, wherever we are and wherever we go, may we live in ways that nurture dignity for each and for all. May we unite politically to choose laws and practices and policies that support a life of dignity for every one, every configuration of family, every differing community, every being without making moral rankings of who is deserving and who is not. May we support and bring forth universal medical care and quality housing, knowing that medical debt and unaffordable and inaccessible housing are leading causes of eroding dignity and of creating long-term poverty. May we support reparations for past injustices and inequities that took enormous resources and wealth generated from the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of people from Africa, indenture from Asia, and other forms of human trafficking. Beloved, help us reckon with the reality that cumulative wealth across generations is matched by inaccessibility to wealth from these historic harms and inequalities. Beloved, may we refuse to accept poverty as part of our economic policies and social practices, not by tidying away visible presences of impoverished people from wealthier neighborhoods, but by actually ensuring that everyone has a nice place to call home, enough to eat, clean water, clean air, and the chance to nurture meaningful relationships and joy in this life. As we remember all those who have striven for, shown up to make real, and taken risks to make a more equitable and dignified life for all, may we, too, live into these commitments. Amen.

Prayer for Housing Equity and Justice

One who finds every fox a den, every bird a nest, every mouse a place to lay its head when weary, help us find the courage, commitment, and follow-through to advocate for, convert, retrofit, and rebuild accessible, low-income, transitional, affordable, equity-distributing housing in every community. May we convert office buildings and transform sky terraces into playgrounds and places for all ages to gather and breathe, to move and to be free. May we build sustainability into these solutions, use different ways to move historically excluded peoples into ownership, find practices that are net energy producing and community strengthening. So many are so weary with the scramble for housing, even low-quality, expensive housing. We need changes in how we are living, in the cities and suburbs and rural communities we are creating. May we work together to name those needed changes, to advocate for them, to raise funds to make them happen, to get them built, renovated, installed, and available so more and more, all the people can thrive and say, Amen.

Prayer for Dreaming Change

Arc above us, Blessed Night, in stars and whirling galaxies, reminding us to return to the better aspects of our humanity, to the stuff that nurtures wonderment, dreams and creates the conditions for dignity, and dares to imagine and work toward justice and peace. Arc above us, Blessed Night, to teach us to dream more boldly, to string our alleyways with respect, to make way for all those in need of rest and afraid, to provide welcome when welcome is hard to find. Inspire us, Blessed Dawn, to be the change this world so very much needs, to negotiate imperfect peace and imperfect budgets and imperfect policies on the way to better, on the way out of one group winning and so many others losing. Inspire us, Blessed Dawn, to crack open our hurting hearts after so many losses and not only say “no more” but truly do the work to bring healing across our divisions, to make it harder for people to act in hatred, to make it easier for people to act in generosity, kindness, and love. Blessed Day, meet us in the middle of the work for human rights to be respected, for nurturing and supporting diverse, multicultural societies that do not center one culture or people to the diminishment of another. Meet us in the hard spaces between resentment, atrocity, bitterness, and grief, that we might find our way through into peace-making, amends, healing, and while grieving, still living vibrantly. Let us find rest together, Blessed Dusk, when the differences between us are so much more challenging to perceive. Help us find rest together and courage to make this world more just, equitable, and peaceful for now and the future. Amen.

Prayer for 2023 Transgender Day of Remembrance

Beloved, pause with us as we pull out our handkerchiefs, as we hold onto each other for dear life, as we light candles of remembrance, and as we reckon with hatred and violence on this day. Who wants to be brave? Most of us just want to live, to feel whole, to be loved generously and to love generously in return, as we best understand and know ourselves. Each life ended from violence is a lifetime of blessings prevented from coming into existence. Each life ended from violence is a dream unfinished, love unloved, joy unshared, a person, in all their or his or her or mx or thir complexity, gone because of someone else’s desire to hurt people they did not want to perceive as really people. We do not wonder why. We ache and we mourn and we miss those lost to the violence whipped up by people casually, artfully, and deliberately inciting it. We want a different world, one where our lost siblings are with us, and since we cannot have that, we want a better world where the violence stops here, and we lose no more brilliant, sparkling, precious, fierce, fabulous, and yes, just as messy as everyone else's lives. Beloved, pause with us, to remember, name by name, those lost to the violence. They had names. They had dreams. They had lives that were just as valuable as anyone’s. Beloved, pause with us, to consider how much we really value life this day, and what we can do differently to protect, lift up, and love our transgender family, neighbors, friends, coworkers, and beloveds. We do not need to live in fear. We do not need to live with this hatred aimed against us. We need to live as the ones we mourn today would have lived: squeezing every bit of juiciness out of life and manifesting the joy that is everyone’s birthright, even as the scrambled, scrabbled, and stretched to make their love and wholeness reality. Amen.

 

Prayer for Nurturing Love Amid Division

Holder of Spaces, Supporter of Hearts, teach us the ways to nurture love amid divisiveness, when there are many planting intolerance, mistrust, suspicion, and hate. Teach us to cultivate caring connections, to protect our neighbors at risk from hate as we would protect ourselves, to meet and counter intolerance and ignorance with truth and invitations to recognize our interconnectedness. Teach us to live courageously and when we encounter mistrust or find that waking within us, to take faithful risks to lean into and learn to trust, to develop meaningful relationships that allow us to live and work well together in our varied differences. Teach us to live awake and aware of how suspicion grows to keep us divided and afraid of one another, and when we find suspicion, to go inquire, learn more, find out what is true and real, to ask questions about why it is so urgent for someone else that we mistrust, dislike, disparage, or hate another. Holder of Spaces, Supporter of Hearts, teach us to hold space to find connections we can nurture that grow a more loving and trusting multicultural world, more gracious and healthful communities that help all thrive and leave no one behind or cast aside as less than or unworthy. Holder of Spaces, Supporter of Hearts, may we put down the shield of “don’t know and don’t want to” and wade, roll, and breathe into these difficult spaces where divisiveness is viewed valorously as defending the best people or way of life, recognizing that we have so many ways of being because we are so beautifully and amazingly variable as a species, and that what brings peace and happiness is learning well of how to live and thrive in our diversity together. Amen.