Below are prayers for this week. It was an idea to offer these along with a sense of why these prayers were meaningful to the people who shared them.
Prayer One: by Elizabeth McAlister
This prayer was given by American peace activist and prisoner of conscience Elizabeth McAlister at a dinner with Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Season of winter, be our teacher. Season of harvested fields and food stored up, teach us to know when enough is enough. Replace our restless striving for more and more with a spirit of deep gratitude and engaged compassion for those with empty eyes and parched hopes.
Season of winter, be our teacher. Season of darkness, death and dying, teach us to hear the death rattles around us, to hear the cries of a world dying at our own hands – sisters and brother and the earth itself devoured by our greed and violence. May we know that it is only through hearing and heeding that we will become fully human.
And when our spirits wither, give us the hope of this season, when dark nights slowly yield to the light’s ineluctable strength. When our spirits falter, give us the love this season, when birth erupts from the heart of death.
And when we taste the ashes of sorrow and forget the bread of life, give us the faith of this season to believe that it all has meaning, that nothing – nothing – is lost.
When we are tempted to look away from our sisters and brothers in need, give us the deep conviction of our communion with all life so we never drift from this table of fellowship and starve in the desert of selfishness. Let us partake of this meal in a spirit of unity. In a world where food is a weapon, let us take from this table the bread of peace.
This prayer is offered by Zachary Dutton
My sister is 40. I’m 32.
What keeps us coming back to Thanksgiving? We’re both white, and we were both raised in Anglo families. Over the past fifteen years we’ve had a journey similar to many other well-meaning white liberals, coming to terms with the profound complicity of our family and our ancestors in centuries of oppression, colonizing, and genocide. Thanksgiving is one of the clearest representations of the kinds of white washing that she and I have had to undo as we age and commit ourselves to lifetimes of service.
Like the racism we will spend many more generations undoing, Thanksgiving both anchors us in home and problematizes our experience of home. And each year we recognize that simply choosing not to celebrate the holiday will never solve the problems that plague us at the very foundations of our society.
Thus, we’ve had the practice of reading a prayer that was shared with me in 2012 by a mentor at Harvard Divinity School.
This prayer helps us take stock and recommit ourselves to the service and solidarity the world desperately needs from all of us.
Prayer Two: by Marian Wright Edelman
Founder and President Emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund, author, social justice activist, educator and public theologian. Interfaith Day of Prayer, May 7, 2020
O God, strengthen our hope for our children’s sake.
Strengthen our courage for our children’s sake.
Strengthen our discipline for our children’s sake.
Strengthen our ability to work together for our children’s sake.
Strengthen our spirit of sacrifice for our children’s sake.
Strengthen our faith in Thee for our children’s sake.
We ask these things in these most difficult days, and in all the days to come,
that we might build a nation and world where all children are safe, healthy, loved,
and justice abounds.
This prayer is offered by Melinda Wenner Bradley
Marian Wright Edelman frequently includes prayers in her weekly emails from the Children’s Defense Fund. Over six decades as a lawyer, Civil Rights activist, and advocate for children, her voice has spoken truth about the racial, economic, and educational disparities in this country, and our national responsibility to all our children. Her writing has been a guiding light for me since I was a young teacher.
My father met Marian during the War on Poverty, when they were both in the Mississippi Delta with Robert Kennedy in 1967, and he was an advisor to the senator on issues of rural poverty. Years later, I remember as a child being at a conference in Washington, D.C. with my parents and sister. We were going up an escalator and a woman coming down the other side called to my father and greeted him.
To my child’s eyes, this stranger (Marian) was surrounded by other people and must be someone important. Here I was with my little family and I thought, “How do you know my daddy?” More than a decade later, she was the speaker when my sister graduated from Guilford College, and we had the opportunity to meet her. By then, I understood how people like Marian Wright Edelman had shaped my parents’ work and those concerns also led them to Quakerism. I’m grateful as a daughter, educator, parent, and Friend for patterns and examples like these.
Prayer Three: by Eleanor Roosevelt
Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life.
Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength.
Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world.
Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them.
Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of the world made new.
This prayer is offered by Molly Brian
Molly Brian is Clerk at Third Haven Meeting in Easton MD. Her favorite prayer is the one by Eleanor Roosevelt, shared above.
She also shared the message about Quaker strengths in times of trouble with the Third Haven Community last week. Like the rest of our world, the Maryland is coping with an increase in Covid transmissions.
As we approach our “Holy Days” in the Western World, it’s good to remember some things we do so well as Quakers. First, we are believers in “Holding one another in the Light” as a powerful spiritual practice, vital to the individual receiving this Divine Love AND those giving it.
Secondly, we are believers in our testimonies. The strength of these values grants us the deep wisdom of believing that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Thirdly, our strong sense of empathy allows us to creatively reach out to others in ways we have not previously had time to do. Notes, calls, and virtual visits are now part of our norm. Our ability to enter into new ways of relating is now strong and can carry us through the winter days.
