Prayer

Since the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity this year will coincide with the Lunar New Year season, I have this New Year couplet (春貼) to offer:

同舟共濟百又壹冬祈和好
天下為公兩千玖春更合壹

Tóngzhōu gòngjì, bǎiyòuyī dōng qí héhǎo;
tiānxià wéigōng, liǎngqiājiǔ chūn gèng héyī.

All in the same boat and helping each other, we have prayed for reconciliation for 101 winters;
the whole world but a single commonwealth, in spring 2009 we shall become more at one.

It surely does not follow the meter, and especially in bad form as the first four syllables of each singlet are a cliché.

Well, what is the line going across on the top doorframe (橫批)? Of course, it has to be the four Greek syllables οἰ-κου-μέ-νη, written à la sini Arabic or quốc ngữ.

And instead of the pair of mythical door guards, certainly Peter and Paul should have the honour of place, upholding the church.

If you implement this at your church, I would appreciate that you taking a photograph and leaving a message here to let me know. I might make a mock up image when I have time.

Happy new year!

At the risk of obsessively praying about waste and recycling, I have this prayer to offer, which I trust to be sensibly Trinitarian.

(John Calvin was wrong. The Purgatory does exist. I have seen it with my own eyes, at the Redbridge recycling station.)

God our Creator, in your mercy:
Help us to learn how to live in Paradise, where nothing is wasted,
where we walk or cycle with you as you intended.
Bless the workers who sort our recycling,
who, as befit people created in your image, re-create order out of chaos.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Christ our Saviour, in your mercy:
Remove us from the flashy sports cars and the 4×4s (SUVs)
which only speed us to the incinerating Armageddon.
Remind us of your crown, when we see the thornbushes growing over the landfill.
Remind us of your Cross, whenever we see smokestacks or wind turbines on the hill.
Remind us of your Passion and your Resurrection.

Χριστὲ ἐλέησον.

Holy Spirit our Advocate and Comforter, in your mercy:
Guard us on our bus route for the recycling centre.
Purge us of our sins of pride and greed.
Blow your wind on us and drive us in your dynamic,
as on the wind turbines, and as on Pentecost.
Bless with your wordless prayer
everything that has a recycling symbol.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Amen.

(By the way, Chris Goodall’s second book is out: Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.)

Will you pray with me?
Let us pray.

1

God, we pray for the world.

The prayer cycle of the World Council of Churches
reminds us to pray today for the peoples of
Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.

We thank you for
the freedom for Christians to worship in Mauritania
even though it is an Islamic country.
We thank you for
those who depend on nomadic ways of life and
continue to retain their ethnic heritage.
We thank you for
those who plant trees to counter the spread of the desert.

We pray for stability in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
We pray for an end to slavery in Mauritania.
We pray for an end to civil war in Chad.

Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.
Read the rest of this entry »

Will you pray with me?
Let us pray.

1

God, we pray for the world.

The prayer cycle of the World Council of Churches
reminds us to pray today for the peoples of
Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea.
We also pray at this time
for the Democratic Republic of Congo and for Rwanda,
for those people displaced from their homes due to the conflict,
for the peacekeepers and diplomats
working in a difficult situation.

Today we remember all the road traffic victims,
on the day designated for this remembrance.

Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.
Read the rest of this entry »

So they scorn: “The Left has been predicting for decades the recession that never came.” Alas, now the recession has finally come, where is the Left? The Right will steal and fight (indeed, are already stealing and fighting) to keep the status quo. See earlier kairos (καιρός).

I have been reading Saint Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and not before time! It is steeped in Gospel (though without annoying prooftexts) and in every turn corroborating with the insights of Herman Dooyeweerd. He articulated about “praxis” better than I did in my muddle about shopping as prayer. And it remains relevant: to start, it is a devastating predictive analysis of the British phenomenon called New Labour.

Are you in communion with this church? Iglesia Cristiana Reformada Paraíso, Barahona, República Dominica:

Verso published earlier this month a collection of Toussaint Louverture’s writings, introduced by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That’s the next book on my reading list.

Editor’s note: This will be part of a Holy Week prayer service at the Federal Building in Worcester.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, under the inspiratrion of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, who gave his life to denounce an unjust war, on the fifth anniversary of the latest US escalation of its 17-year-long war on Iraq, we gather to beg Your forgiveness for the sin of this war and to ask for Your grace to end it now. We make these prayers in the name of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Amen.

For the over 88,000 Iraqi citizens killed since 2003, we pray:
Lord, have mercy.

For the 4,100 US soldiers killed in Iraq since 1991, we pray:
Christ, have mercy.

For the 200,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War, we pray:
Lord, have mercy.

For the 1.5 million Iraqis, including 800,000 children, killed by US-sponsored sanctions between 1991 and 2002, we pray:
Kyrie, eleison.

For the thousands of Iraqis killed by “no-fly zone” bombings between 1991 and 2002, we pray:
Christe, eleison.

For our failure to speak out more forcefully against the sin of this long war on Iraq, we pray:
Kyrie, eleison.

Recalling that Pope John Paul II called war on Iraq “useless slaughter” and “unjust, immoral, and illegal,” we pray the rosary to Mary, Queen of Peace, that the ears of all those in the federal government might finally be opened to attend to the plea of millions of Americans who want the war to end now.

Pray a rosary:

The First Sorrowful Mystery: Christ’s agony in the garden.
Help us to end the agony of the Iraqi people and to return all American soldiers safely home.

The Second Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus is scourged.
Help us to end the torture our nation continues to inflict on prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Third Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus is crowned with thorns.
Help us to never again drop cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and other weapons onto the heads of the Iraqi people.

The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus carries the Cross.
Help us to take up Christ’s cross of nonviolent love (even at the risk of criticism and jail) to end the Iraq War.

The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus dies on the Cross.
Help us to love our enemies as profoundly as Christ did from his Cross and to reject this and all wars.

Close with the Salve Regina.

Let us pray.

1

God, we thank you for the commandments
passed down to us in the Hebrew tradition,
in which Jesus was immersed.

Help us to be brought to you,
yet again to you,
yet closer to you,
when we hear the Shema:
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is One!”

Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.
Read the rest of this entry »

Verse 11: “The woman said to [Jesus],
‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.
Where do you get that living water?’” (John 4:11, NRSV)

God, sometimes we take it for granted when we turn on a tap,
forgetting that, for most people in the world, water is hard to come by.
We thank you for the aqueducts and reservoirs that supply our water,
and we remember the jars on women’s heads in faraway lands.
Give us patience and wisdom when we run short of water.
Read the rest of this entry »

As Roman Catholics who love the Church, we listened closely to Pope John Paul II who called the 2003 Iraq War “a defeat for humanity” and to Pope Benedict XVI who said, “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq,” and went on to say, “We should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a just war.”

We remember that, despite the Vatican’s clear opposition to the Iraq War, only one American Bishop, Most Rev. John Michael Botean, condemned it. In a 2003 Lenten Pastoral Letter, Bishop Botean called the Iraq War “objectively grave evil, a matter of mortal sin.”

On March 19, the Iraq War will enter its fifth year. More than 150,000 Iraqi civilians and nearly 4,000 American soldiers have perished. Hundreds of thousands of our sisters and brothers have been injured, orphaned, or left homeless.

We cannot help but wonder if this war could have been prevented with a stronger voice of opposition from all of us in the American Catholic Church. We admit our own complicity by our failure to raise our own voices more forcefully. But, even now, we believe that the voice of our Church can help end the bloodshed.

Therefore, inspired by the witness of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, we join concerned Catholics in twelve other dioceses around the United States to call for a Lenten prayer and fast for peace. Like Jagerstatter, the only known Roman Catholic to refuse service in Hitler’s military during World War II, we believe that the Church must not stay “silent in the face of what is happening.” Starting on Ash Wednesday, we invite all people of conscience to join us at Saint Paul’s Cathedral for midday Mass each weekday, followed by a peace vigil outside the church and, shortly thereafter, at the nearby United States Federal Building. We will conclude our prayer and fasting during Holy Week on March 19th with a special Catholic peace witness at the Federal Building.

We hope and pray that this witness in Worcester and other dioceses around the country will draw the Church closer to the nonviolent Christ and help our nation to end the Iraq War and Occupation.

God, on this Sunday after the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity,
we again thank you for your Church;
and for our sisters and brothers united in your son, Jesus Christ,
who taught us to pray to you as our father in heaven.

Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.
Read the rest of this entry »