Let Joy Shake Our Household

This prayer was written for Sunday morning worship, on a day in which the sermon topic was "The Stewardship of Creation." It was written on a morning when I had awoken to write early enough to see Orion's belt still on display in the early morning sky, a week when one of many deaths in the congregation was coated in an unkind family squabble, a month where cancer newly permeated the lives of many members, a moment when joy seemed necessary despite it all.

Globally, Donald Trump had just demanded all U.S. military personnel be removed from Syria, resulting in Turkish forces attacking the Kurds, Chile had just endured major street protests and a crush of violence after a hike in transportation fees, rare protests in Lebanon shifted national conversations about leadership and power, China continued to be embroiled in major protests in Hong Kong, and locally, Chicago Public Schools were again caught up in conflicts surrounding teacher contracts.

Linked are poems that inspired this prayer.

O God of bird song and morning breeze, let us walk slowly through the woods of your creation, let us go softly through starlight and moonbeam, let us be filled with this place, sacred, full, a quiet affection filling the room.

In simplicity, the bright sun rings with a quiet sound, and we know again the joy that can shake our whole household. Give us notes of joy, O God, a song of hope, filling us to the brim. For life is hard, and time is short, and ten thousand moments can pass us by without notice.

Fill us with your song of joy, O God, the melody of creation echoing off your love for us. Stand with us in the worries of yesterday, the unaccounted for pain that sharpened bit by bit, yesterday’s bouts of stress and strain, our unkindness that still needs forgiving, our hurt that still needs balm.

Settle near us, in the same places that ache today, in the wounds we carry to this place, in the broken heart hardly begun to be mended. Let your presence itself be relief. Let the inherent shape of your nearness nudges us toward what is possible, within all that is impossible.

Let us risk handing our burdens over to you. Let us give up the squabble, the scheme, the sowing of discord while we can, for the sake of a deeper hope, a mercy by mercy, a future rich with love. Be the engine of our gratitude, O God, and gradually, moment by moment, pull us out and up toward a new way of living, even as we keep stumbling along.

Show us the texture of a new life: one in which love for the beauty of this good green garden earth is met with the sacrifice and commitment of community. Let us be stewards of your creation. Let us tend to the stewardship of all that is green and growing. Let us embrace a departure from selfish human abundance, so that all creatures might sing love and life: sky and grass and every almost-extinct perfect species created from love and visible matter by you, the One in whom we place our trust, the One in whom we place our lives.

Be in every impossible place: in Syria and Turkey, in Lebanon and Israel, in Chile and China. Be in every impossible conflict from Chicago Public Schools to the White House. Be in every impossible diagnosis in our own households and hospitals and homes far from here where we’ve sent our loved ones. Be, O God. Be present, and hear us as we offer up to you the prayers of our hearts in faith and in silence.