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People wonder about how to pray out loud. In my tradition Jesus said this simple prayer:
Mother, father, sister, brother and friend, Who makes everything sacred, and all life possible,
we ask only enough for today.
Release the burdens of yesterday as we release the debts of those we have burdened.
Protect us from distraction and anything that is not of life. May it be.
That’s all he said.
And then he turned back to healing. -
From Prayers for a Newer New Awakening. Available here.
Category Archives: leading causes of life
Speak Life
I wish I was handing you this in person in a decent restaurant with a bit more ceremony involved. But I didn’t want to wait to get my new book in your hands. Speak Life: Crafting Mercy in a Hard-Hearted … Continue reading
Finding Our Bearings
How do we find our bearings when we are so far off the known map? Last week I reflected on how bearings were the things we rest our weight on when times are mean. We humans simply must bear each … Continue reading
Tender
Things are seen in in the terrible intimacy of the ED every day that should not happen once in a thousand years. Except they happen in entire zip codes, too; the same damn ones for decades. This morning I presided … Continue reading
Crafting life together
It can all fall apart, this democracy thing. It’s not like gravity that makes rocks fall, even if you don’t believe in it. Democracy only lives in the mind and spirit and evaporates when we forget it. The belief that … Continue reading
Thanks for the fish
Sunday morning I found myself, an incurable optimist, preaching perched on the chasm of doom, 46 hours into a Trump presidency. Green Street United Methodist is the archetype of the raggedly dogged social action church. The kind that Newt things … Continue reading
Championship Spirit
You can no longer watch championship basketball in North Carolina because of a political train wreck involving sex, bathrooms and religion. In spite of some of those same politics, this is a great place to watch something more important, a championship … Continue reading
Body politic, limping
Ninety or so days from now our body politic will be on the other side of the most dangerous passage since the Civil War. (Here’s an exact countdown.) I think that Mr. Trump will have found a way to abandon … Continue reading
Runaway heart
My daughter Lauren is about to give birth to my second grandson, which, with her sense of dramatic timing will probably happen on Mothers’ Day. This also kicks off Nurses’ Week in hospitals. My wife and my (now former) first … Continue reading
Mainsail
Perhaps you’ve met a human. You have noticed that we can be hard to help. Perhaps you’ve been to a planet like Earth and noticed the same thing, except 7 billion different ways. How do you help something with 7 … Continue reading
Faith with
There were years when I was across the ocean that I would tell people I was from Canada to avoid explaining US politics. People in more normal countries dumbfounded my people would be found dumb enough to vote for a … Continue reading