Creator of the star-fields,
During this new moon week, when the sky is the deepest depth of dark, the canopy of stars are especially visible in their brilliance. Pin-pricks of light on the velvet drape of night.
We can see an unnameable number of stars, and there are many more we cannot see with the naked eye. You have promised that you know each blaze of light by name. We imagine your voice as a Holy Caress of love as you speak the name of each star.
As we on Earth spin in the rhythms of the galactic conversation, many people cannot see the meadows of light above us. Much keeps us from seeing beyond the glare in our lives—smog, city light-pollution, weather, distractions, suffering and prisons of injustice that suppress sight.
But even when we cannot see, You, God of the sky-river, see us. You number each of the stars. You call us each by name.
Emboldened in being named Beloved, we pray for all in our beautiful, aching world. For the things we don’t know to name, and for those that we speak, knowing you already see the full contours of each situation.
- For world leaders as they convene at the G7 Nato Summit, may U.S. President Biden renew and invigorate the cooperative relationship between the United States and European allies. Give all these leaders courage to remember we live interconnected under the wide-sky.
- With the importance of so many transatlantic issues for a peaceful world, may the meeting between U.S. President Biden and Russia President Putin hold productive and constructive talks.
- We cry “how long” with the people of Israel and Palestine and join voices with prayers for true and lasting peace. We lift our hopes for change in this window of opportunity to reopen a peace process, for leadership change and a coalition formed. For the exhausted, grieving and hopeless: may they experience your comfort like gentle moon-beams.
- We grieve the brutal loss of life of ten mine clearance workers in Afghanistan, killed ‘in cold blood’ as they slept. May this region, that has held so much loss, feel your Presence of Peace as people grieve and move not toward more division but toward unity and shalom.
- We pray for those who grieve loved ones in South Korea, where nine died after a building collapsed on a bus parked briefly in front of it.
- We pray for peace in Burkina Faso, where the UN chief has called for the international community to speak out against the violent extremism that left 160 dead this weekend, the deadliest attack in the country in years.
We all sleep under the same dazzling stars, yet human-created borders again and again give us the illusion that we are separate.
- We pray that U.S. Vice President Harris’s trip to Guatemala, to engage the root causes of migration from Central America, will bear fruit. May the United States acknowledge its complicity in this complicated relationship and may hearts, minds and resources be opened toward creative lasting solutions.
- In some countries, many are feeling relief from COVID’s constant presence as we gather again with family and have more ease of movement. We give thanks for this shift and give gratitude for the many scientists, health care workers and others who have made this possible. In this turning may we humbly acknowledge our privilege and remember so much of the world that is still deep in the throes of the virus in Mongolia, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Suriname, and Uruguay. We give thanks that cases in India are on the decline, and pray for comfort for the many, many who grieve.
- We pray for the same relief to spread across the globe. We pray for increased generosity of wealthy nations to Covax (the effort to get vaccines to impoverished nations). May the giving of support and of the vaccine increase. May we see that we are one.
- May all those around the world who have suffered great losses during this pandemic look to the heavens and feel the constant presence of your Love, O Comforter, Presence in the darkest dark.
God of beauty, rhythm, and transformation, we thank you for people everywhere who know that the whole of this spinning globe cannot be well, until each individual created thing can thrive. We pray for new strength and hope for the many who, out of this knowing, work daily in small courageous ways toward wholeness.
We are loved exactly as we are, where we are. May we have courage to look into the night-skies in our lives and follow the Star of Light toward deeper love.
We pray in the name of the One who names us,
Amen.
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