A Personal Take on a Classic Prayer*

Nurturing, caring God,

Whose 'location' is something of a mystery

    but whose dwelling place is surrounded by wholeness and thriving;

Who you are is holy.

May the signs of your perfect stewardship flourish into reality,

May your loving purposes be enacted,

Here and now,

In this place and time,

As well as in the visions we glimpse and the future we hope for.

We reach to you in trust for the sustenance we need for today.

Lift the burden of our brokenness and the lacking in our limits

    with your kindness and grace

Teaching us by your example to do the same.

Call us away from the harm we are enticed by and fall into -

Deliver us from ruin.

In you is the destination, 

              the key,

              all beauty and truth.

              Always.

                        AMEN.

*Cf. 'The Lord's Prayer' - if you hadn't picked that up by now!

Digital Unity

Musings on Unity

From the Congregational Saying of The Lord's Prayer

On Zoom

In a Time of COVID

Let us say together the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray...

It won't be slick

It's out of sync

        But never mind.

Now we know

It's less 'the show'

        More willing commitment.

Prayers in a COVID Winter

"Roll on Spring", we say.

I say.

Roll on lockdown liberation

And the nation's vaccination

Actual corporeal congregation

Even taking vacation!

And in our desperation 

"End this, God!" we pray;

"Get us back to normal"

Our petitionary oblation.

Oh! 

How we need your grace for our prayers

As well as our hearts and hospitals and homes.

May they hold more truth and wisdom and life

Than simple grass is greener tropes.

Yes, Lord! We long for relief

For the ebbing of this tide of grief

And it's in fervent, hopeful belief,

    That we seek the green blade rising.

Yet as we do, let us hear your asserting:

Your re-greening will be more than re-vert-ing,

For true nourishing hope draws up the hurting

    In its holy metabolising. 

Written with input from my colleague, Rev Sarah Crane, Lead Chaplain at Milton Keynes University Hospital