A Prayer For Imagination and Love
God of inexpressible creativity,
give us the freedom to imagine, with you, the kind of world that you would call "very good." Give us freedom from our fears to imagine ourselves loving the unlovable and standing along side the oppressed.
Give us freedom to remember, and to re-member, your body and your blood in this, your world--to remember with our hands and with our feet, Your tortured, crucified, and risen Son. May we truly be the body of Christ and may we be it in all ways, even in our attempts to defend ourselves.
We honor you with our lips but our hearts, that beating organ through which we may love and trust, are so very far from you. May our hearts cry out to you as our only true hope, even when bombs and bullets might seem sufficient for our salvation.
Hear us, Lord, from your temple--the one who came washed the feet of his "subordinates"--and when you hear, forgive.
Give us the imaginative freedom to ask not for more than we need but to really be satisfied with our daily bread, so that those from whom we'd have to steal in order to get more than we need, might have their daily bread as well.
God, give us a willing heart so that when we say "we," our "we" might include the tired, the hungry, the broken, the poured-out, and even the crucified.
And finally, God, may we fall deeply in love with you. Not with ideas of you, with the convenience of your grace, or with the power we might wish to exploit by knowing you, but with you alone. Let us not fail to see your intimate love for us any longer. Let us not simply use you as a way to accomplish our goals, however noble they may be. But let us love you and to rediscover that love again as when we were children. And let that love be the catalyst for our worship and our work in the world. Amen
give us the freedom to imagine, with you, the kind of world that you would call "very good." Give us freedom from our fears to imagine ourselves loving the unlovable and standing along side the oppressed.
Give us freedom to remember, and to re-member, your body and your blood in this, your world--to remember with our hands and with our feet, Your tortured, crucified, and risen Son. May we truly be the body of Christ and may we be it in all ways, even in our attempts to defend ourselves.
We honor you with our lips but our hearts, that beating organ through which we may love and trust, are so very far from you. May our hearts cry out to you as our only true hope, even when bombs and bullets might seem sufficient for our salvation.
Hear us, Lord, from your temple--the one who came washed the feet of his "subordinates"--and when you hear, forgive.
Give us the imaginative freedom to ask not for more than we need but to really be satisfied with our daily bread, so that those from whom we'd have to steal in order to get more than we need, might have their daily bread as well.
God, give us a willing heart so that when we say "we," our "we" might include the tired, the hungry, the broken, the poured-out, and even the crucified.
And finally, God, may we fall deeply in love with you. Not with ideas of you, with the convenience of your grace, or with the power we might wish to exploit by knowing you, but with you alone. Let us not fail to see your intimate love for us any longer. Let us not simply use you as a way to accomplish our goals, however noble they may be. But let us love you and to rediscover that love again as when we were children. And let that love be the catalyst for our worship and our work in the world. Amen
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