Divine Mystery,
We lay our hearts before you.
Come Spirit come, and unite us in voice. Awaken us to the tribulations in this world.
Perhaps a little bird is sent to visit us.
A stern breeze blows the pages of a book we are reading.
A clap of thunder suddenly in the night.
We mourn two anniversaries in our World News This Week in Prayer.
- Three years ago on May 24, 2022, 19 children and 2 teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, USA were murdered in a school attack, victims of preventable gun violence.
- George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, USA five years ago on May 25, 2020.
It is reported this week that the USA administration and its Department of Justice have abandoned federal investigations or oversight of nearly two dozen police departments with records of egregious misconduct. We lament, Lord.
Heart of this World,
You are at work among the ways of the world. Your Spirit moves in these times of darkness; in these dark nights of the soul when all seems hopeless, bleak, despairing. We feel powerless as we continue to hear how El Salvador’s prisons are a living hell. Reports continue to tell of the Salvadoran President’s violation of United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (known as the Mandela Rules). O Lord, bring your rule of daylight to these places of horror. Send the fresh air rule of truth and justice into these places. Swell all libraries, and especially prison libraries, with the rule of books, internet access and lively human discourse. Bring your creation into these spaces, so that rehabilitation may take the place of torture, and the rule of outdoor exercise may liberate the mind, body and spirit. Give courage to Spanish-language media outlets, such as El País, whose journalistic work calls out this prison complex so interwoven in authoritarianism.
Great Compassion,
Our prayers this week look back to Memorial Day, May 26. The sacrifice of those serving in war and so-called peace time, of the dead and missing, is beyond belief, staggering, suffusing all of our lives. Bring your quiet comfort to these memories. Wrap your strength about those left disabled, those suffering physical dismemberment and severe emotional trauma. Be with the families torn, and yet living with their loved ones, who served and sacrificed. An opinion article in the New York Times brings us face to face with the remembrance of sacrifice and duty. Drew Gilpin Faust, the author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and a former president of Harvard University quotes Fredrick Douglass, American social reformer and abolitionist: “They died for their country. … They died for their country,” Douglass repeated. They had fought against the “hell-black system of human bondage” and for a nation that embodied “the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.” Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined.”
We remember Your sacrifice, O Lord. Υou are the Saving Grace. Comfort us.
Still Small Voice,
May we give attention to your voice over the voices of power that seek to drown out the many. Foreign Affairs reports this week that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to strip 350,000 immigrants from Venezuela of the status that had protected them from deportation. Some are returning on their own. Some return to see family and leave home again. In Syria we hear people are returning to their homeland and neighborhoods, though destroyed, and others are uncertain about returning, but home is calling, calling.
Help us to attend to the migrant, the displaced, the asylum seeker and the exiled.
Via Negativa,
We pray in this moment, not understanding, not knowing, unable to grasp your depth and your reach in time and space which is beyond all our reckoning.
The thunder,
the little bird,
the wind
each visitor, stirring our lives, mixing our unutterable loneliness with stillness, the heartache with rest, the confusion with a momentary smile, the craving for calm with your peace.
We lift our prayers for the peoples of Yemen, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Russia, Palestine and Israel. Those at the borders, detention centers, jungles and on seas, which many cross to find respite and home, only to be turned back. We pray for people moving through Columbia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and USA.
Lord, have mercy. Teach us the way of mercy.
We raise these and our own prayers.
Then, we do your good work.
May it be so.
Amen
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