Morning Prayers Tuesday, 18 August 2020
Assiduously
By Claudia Castro Luna
From a coffee cup’s sweet bitterness into cold wind swept
knowing that the place you search and yearn for is nowhere,
no street names, no city gate.
No degrees nor longitudinal measures to speak of.
A compass can be useless when you are lost.
Nowhere multiplies in your chest ravenous, like yeast.
It hurts. The exact second, your shadow on the pavement.
Sometimes your life is a minute ahead
and a few days behind the place you want to be.
Sometimes things align and you want to tear a piece of the shadow
as you would a piece from a loaf of bread.
But this place you search has no replicable terrain, no map.
It moves as you move.
A shapeshifter with a tropic of memory, a tropic of fear,
a meridian to decide you can and an equator to know you choose.
Good morning and welcome to Morning Prayer
The night has passed, and the day lies open before us;
let us pray with one heart and mind
Silence is kept
As we rejoice in the gift of this new day,
so may the light of your presence, O God,
set our hearts on fire with love for you;
now and for ever.
Amen.
Breathe in
Breathe out
Be still…
I arise today,
embraced in the arms
of God the Father,
empowered by the strength
of God the Spirit,
immersed in the love
of God the Son.
I arise today
in the company
of the Trinity,
Father, Spirit and Son.
I arise today
Amen
Presence
I slow myself down for a moment, and try to realise that God is present.
To me. Here and now. He is in present in what I do,
in the people that I meet, and the situations I find myself in daily.
How can I make this reality real for myself?
Freedom
Lord, I pray for your gift of freedom.
May your Holy Spirit
guide those in power to work for
equality for all your people.
Consciousness
Grant, O Lord, that I may be conscious
and grateful for all the good things you have given to me.
May I share my blessings with others always.
The Word of God
Matthew 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced
the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them,
a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
WORDS OF WISDOM
Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. . . .
The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. [The founder of Sikhism] Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, [Hindu mystic saint] Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. . . .
What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.
But you don’t have to be religious in order to open to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of what you once knew as a child. If you remember how to wonder, then you already have what you need to learn how to love.
Valarie Kaur
PRAYERS & INTERCESSIONS
We pray for the world…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
We pray for the universal church of Christ…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
We pray for one another and all those known to us…
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer
As our Saviour taught us, so we pray
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.
May God the Father
prepare your journey,
Jesus the Son
guide your footsteps,
The Spirit of Life
strengthen your body,
The Three in One
watch over you,
on every road
that you may follow.
Amen
BLESSING
May your day be blessed
by moments of quietness,
light in your darkness,
strength in your weakness,
grace in your meekness,
joy in your gladness,
peace in your stillness.
May your day be blessed
Amen
Thank you for join us. Have a wonderful day!
Revd. Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga
