UniversalistPrayers

Prayer to Widen Our Circle of Care

A Prayer to Widen Our Circle of Care

Heart of Compassion, may we learn, day by day, moment by moment, how to widen our circles of care, as we begin with the coil of sweetgrass wrapped around itself in the centre, and build that circle outward, to create a mat, a basket, a bowl, a space that holds, nurtures, and supports those that rest thereupon and therein. Heart of Compassion, may we widen the circle of care to include people who differ from us in beliefs both minor and major, who speak and sign differently from us, who dance in ways we have not learned, who sing with scales and traditions and techniques that hold their hearts but ours have yet to fully understand. Heart of Compassion, may we widen our circle of care to include people who love shyly and who love boldly, who are attracted to people we could never be attracted to, who gender in ways we ourselves don’t feel for our own being, who cook food that surprises our senses, and whose poetry are traditions unfamiliar to us. Heart of Compassion, may we widen our circle of care, to the people we do not yet know, to love every stranger as neighbor, family, and friend, to have a love past the boundaries of proximity, because we trust and know that we inter-are, that, sharing this life, we depend on one another in it. Heart of Compassion, may we learn to widen our circle of care, into these mysteries of relationship, past these obstacles of fear and mistrust, until we can truly mean, “may all beings be free and safe from harm, be well, have love, lovingkindness, and friendship.” Amen.

Prayer of Choosing Love

Prayer of Choosing Love - Week of January 22, 2023

Courageous Grace, may we notice our choices in how and whether we love, that love is not some place we can send a postcard from, but a verb, to be renewed everyday by our doing.  Love is a feeling, nourishing trust and generosity and compassion, mutual regard and mutual understanding, including of our separating differences, that, of course, we each have. Loving can define us just as surely as not loving, as apathy or disregard or hate can define and shape us, for where we spend our time, our effort, our dreams, that is what we strengthen. Courageous Grace, may we choose to love more, tenderly, justly, compassionately, boldly, quietly, fiercely, imperfectly, in our own ways that can change from day to day and year to year. And may we love enough to perceive the enoughness in each other, to cherish the blessings we each can be and as we choose to co-create blessings, the blessings we become. Courageous Grace, may we renew how we love and our choices each day, with intention, whole-heartedness, and joy. Amen.

Prayer for Nurturing Community

Prayer for Nurturing Community - Week of January 15, 2023

Beloved, what does it take to nourish, every day, just and healing, thriving diverse communities? May we take up these tools, develop these skills, devote ourselves to these tasks with courage and with joy that we can choose to nourish and transform communities, deal with inequities and injustices, and co-create a world of equity, justice, and care. Beloved, we each cannot do it all, and yet, may we devote ourselves each day to what we can do to leave no one behind, to forget no harm and no help, to cultivate creative communities of generosity, gratitude, thick and trusting connections. Beloved, may we show up, day after day, to make love and justice more real, to worry less about lipservice and more about changes to actions and to transforming understanding, hearts, and relationships. Beloved, may we keep the heritage of the many who have gone before us, doing their imperfect and still best to create a thriving, multicultural world of justice, love, and care, and do our own imperfect and still best to the do the same. Amen.

Prayer of Self-Acceptance

Prayer for the Week of January 1, 2023 - A Prayer of Self-Acceptance

Grace and Compassion, may we love and accept ourselves as we are and as we may change. May we love and accept ourselves as we are, with the seeds of growth for responsibility, care, peacemaking, joy, justice building, nurturing wonderment, and dancing with delight. May we love and accept ourselves in the bodies we have, whatever shape and size they are, however we might be categorized or ranked by powers and authorities, however we move, however we laugh, however we love, however we think or process or imagine and live to make our dreams real. May we love and accept ourselves as we are, and as we are becoming, and put down the self-colonizing tools of shame, the self-hatred and self-mistrust. May we love and accept ourselves as we are, and as we are becoming, releasing improbable, impossible, and harmful ideals, and embracing our gifts, our particular strengths. May we love and accept ourselves as we are, and as we are becoming, redirecting our power and energy from self-condemnation to nourishing communities of dignity, from self-loathing to nourishing diverse friendships and neighborhoods, from self-hatred to loving this world and this life so boldly we show up with generosity, gladness, and gratitude for every day. Amen.

Prayer for Playfulness

Prayer for Week of December 26, 2022 - Prayer for Playfulness

Gracious Playfulness invite us into relaxation and the creative life, where we imagine possibilities and problem solve, try on ways of being and try out new dances, get silly and lift one another up with generous joy. May we make the time to play games and to do things we don’t know how to do, to play at games we aren’t good at and to play with others without needing to win. If we use wheelchairs, may we race our wheelchairs and pop wheelies or whirl around, inviting others to notice how much fun this kind of mobility can be. If we use canes or crutches, may we create new dance moves, figure out new shadow figures to cast (we’re talking about you shadow pterodactyls), and swing through the world with abandon, noticing how much fun this kind of mobility can be. If we travel on one foot or two, may we play games with how we ambulate, strengthen our balance leaning over to one side on one foot, crouch down and bounce up, noticing how much fun this kind of mobility can be. May we whoop and laugh until we cry and our bellies hurt from that much joy flooding through us. Gracious Playfulness, thank you for the spaciousness and creativity and pleasure of play. May we be devoted to playfulness every day. Amen.

Prayer for the Earth

Prayer for the Week of December 19, 2022 - Prayer for the Earth

Wisdom, as we turn toward the solstices, those halfway points between equinoxes, the deepening of winter or summer, depending on the hemisphere in which we live, may we pay extra attention to our climate choices and how we care for this earth on which we make our homes. Suffering increases as the climate warps and is pushed beyond what we have knowing, tools, and resources for handling well. Teach us to be more gracious with one another, to share resources more equitably, to condemn those withholding heat or cooling, water or food as tools of political control. Invite us, as we celebrate the return of summer or the return of winter, the apogee of blessed day or blessed night in our year, to tend with compassion and diligence to the ecosystems where we live, the little ecologies in neighborhoods and regions, the microclimates and the zones of thriving and the zones of struggle. May we choose generosity and compassion, and grow in wisdom facing this changing climate, this changing world even as we find the wheel of the year turning in what we want to be, but find increasingly, unfamiliar rhythm. Wisdom, may we rejoice in the blessings of the longest night or the longest day, and remembering each day the gifts of being, work to heal and repair our climate and world equitably, for justice, for the future, and for love’s sake. Amen.

Prayer for Forbearance

Prayer for the Week of December 12 - Prayer for Forbearance

Gracious Love, grant us forbearance so we may offer ourselves and each other spaciousness to turn again in awareness and responsibility and to make amends. May we make space for ourselves when we’re irritable and stressed, space to rest, to return to the home of our hearts, to breathe, to not add fuel to another’s raging or grieving fire. Gracious Love, may we have forbearance when those around us are weary, and make way for all of us to rest, to return to the home of our hearts, to breathe, to observe those harsh fires die down into embers. May we remember forbearance is not the path with patterns of abuse or oppression, because forbearance asks us to remember we, too, have been less than our best selves, making momentarily bad choices rather than willfully choosing a long-term path of harming others to exalt oneself at the expense of others. Gracious Love, may we use forbearance wisely, not to oppress, but to free ourselves and others from expectations of damnation or perfection, allowing us all to be messy, to have difficult days, to say and do wrong things, every once in a while. May we breathe into spaciousness and graciousness that heals and offers us all a little more room to turn again in love. Amen.

Prayer for Generosity

Prayer for the Week of December 6, 2022 - Prayer for Generosity

Gracious Wonderment, may we find ourselves amid life’s abundant worries, cares, and griefs aware of the choices we have in those moments for generosity to others, to listen or attend deeply to another’s worries, to lessen another’s cares, to bear witness to and make space for another’s griefs. May we share the tiny pleasures and joys of being with others, offering each other a window, a portal, an spacious dance floor into wonderment and thankfulness. May we remember how much another’s generosity has changed our lives, altered our days, offered us a reframe, a renewal, a reaffirmation of this life. Gracious Wonderment, all our days we have opportunity after opportunity for generosity of spirit, thought, word, and deed, of time, treasure, and attention, of presence and of spaciousness, of choices and of dreams. May we nurture those, share those, invite others into those profligately, delightedly, devotedly, night and day. Amen.

Prayer for Dreaming Together

Prayer for Dreaming Together - Week of November 28, 2022

Gracious Goodness, let us dream together of a world healed with our care, our daily devotions to repairing damage, our turning again and again with dreams in which every person, every being, every place, every culture matters. May we dream together of a world where people can create refuge and diverse communities for thriving and joy, a world where there is enough and where each person knows they are enough and also there’s still stuff to dream, to learn, to become. May we dream of enoughness that does not mean we are finished, or perfect, or complete, but enoughness where we are vibrant, mistake-making, repenting, learning, and co-creators of a world worthy of dreaming. Gracious Goodness, help us dream together and daily create together a world worthy of living, filled with beautiful, diverse, challenging, hopeful, and joyful dreams becoming real. Amen.

2022 American Thanksgiving Prayer

2022 American Thanksgiving Prayer

Beloved, may we give thanks in every day, and be reasons for others to give thanks. May we know collective secular holidays for what they are, and embrace needed rest, needed connections, needed generous joy, and needed space from demanding expectations. May we learn how to give each other these gifts of graciousness and spaciousness every day. Beloved, may we give thanks in every day, and be reasons for others to give thanks. May we know collective secular holidays for what they have been, and who’s missing from the stories told about them, who’s participating and who isn’t participating in the storytelling, who’s harmed and who’s helped by these stories and why. May we learn to attend to what is true and real with humility and with acceptance that the actors of history are no less imperfect and no less capable of harm than people of the now. Beloved, may we still give thanks in every day, and be reasons for others to give thanks. May we learn to grant each other spaciousness for rest and for release from harsh expectations. And may we not need to erase others’ experiences or what really happened in history to set aside time to love boldly, to live generously, to be thankful. Amen.

Prayer for the Very Sure

Prayer for the Very Sure - Week of November 21, 2022

Lover of the Fallible, the Imperfect, and the Fearful-of-Being-Found-Not-Enough,  invite us again to put down the posturing and lean into the reality of our enoughness without perfection, our lovableness without needing to know everything, our belonging without needing to never make mistakes, for behind all these expectations of self and by others lies our need to be VERY SURE. Lover of Life, you offer us every day lessons in mystery and limitations, in not knowing and not yet, and still we often don’t want to or feel we cannot learn how to be in this zone of unsureness, instability, and changing awareness. Also, we might be exhausted from all that we’re already enduring and maybe could use fewer lessons? Might that be possible? May we have friends to be shoulder to shoulder with, comforting rituals that center and connect us to life’s goodness, and the tools and courage to stay present to what is, as it is unfolding and here we are, actually not being sure and not reaching to claim that. Amen.