Let Us Pray...
Do you hear us Holy One? Do you hear us?
For we are here and we are listening. We are here O God, and we are looking.
There are many paths to be walked, many stories to tell and to be heard. We have a long journey toward knowing one another. And sometimes we hesitate, we are shy, we have bad memories of friendships broken and bonds stretched to nothing. But we take comfort, because before you spoke us all into being, before you loved us into life, before you mothered and fathered us into existence and opened your arms for us to lean into our knowledge of you, before there were words spoken and written—you were there. You were one in your own community. And so we know, that in our deepest parts of heart and mind, body and spirit, we are one as well.
We pray for all who are separated from this knowledge and who express the divide through anger and rage. We pray for all who are separated from this knowledge and forget that the land is our inheritance and belongs us all. We pray for all who are separated from this knowledge and cause others to suffer the effects of discrimination because of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability or age. We pray for all who forget that we are one and turn their backs on the community to live as kings and queens among the poor.
For we know, living God, that for us to be one, we must be equal. We must live so that all may have life in fullness—with what we need instead of what we want. Help us to stand together when liberty is threatened. Help us to speak truth to power when justice is trampled. Help us to shout out when human life is degraded by corporate indifference. Help us to pray when the darkness of superstition and dogma and propaganda coerces and controls.
Give us the power of a mother’s heart which risks even her own life to protect her children. Give us the spirit of a child so that we may trust enough to love all who come, love all that delights, love enough to speak our full hearts to the world. Give us the compassion of a kind and forgiving father who welcomes back all who wander far from the way.
Mend us. Even if you first have to tear us and break us free from our narrow ways to begin the mending. For we are far apart in our own minds. We have forgotten that we are one. And we long to be made whole in our humanity. Keep us together in Christ. Teach us to love one another as you have loved us. Teach us to live into the peace that was given to us by your son, the one who made us one with you—the one who made sure that there was no separation between us and you and therefore, no separation between all siblings.
Teach us.
Teach each one of us, for we know that you are here among us. Amen.
—Anne Weirich
Rev. Anne Weirich is honorably retired from the PC(USA) after serving UCC and PC(USA) churches in four states. She lives on Cape Cod, on the east coast of the US about an hour from Boston, in a small house in the woods on a dirt road. In retirement, she volunteers for CANAAC and still holds a chair on the General Assembly Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relationships. Anne also leads annual pilgrimages to Palestine and Israel and is a board member for Bishop Chacour’s school, Mar Elias, in I’billin, Galilee.