World in Prayer

Sharing in God’s loving compassion for all

Prayers for India

The prayers that name India range widely: heatwaves and floods, the pandemic years, elections and communal tension, the treatment of women and of Dalit and tribal communities, and the safety of workers. Thanksgivings appear too, for rescues, tree planting and voices calling for interfaith unity.

Sing a New Church Into Being: A Prayer for Human Dignity, Melting Permafrost, and Water (January 13, 2022)

As the scheduled writer for this week, I, like so many others, am finding life in its beauty and complexity challenging, dispiriting, frustrating, with more questions than answers and often don’t want to hear what I think God is trying to say to me as the way forward: more of the same old, same old…? […]

Our Hearts and Hands: Advent Prayers for South Sudan’s Floods, Mount Semeru, and India’s Helicopter Crash (December 9, 2021)

God of love, During this season of Advent, as we wait with anticipation for the coming light of the Christ-child, your Love made flesh in the world, we remember that you are a living God, creating with us anew each and every day. For many of us, this is a season of rededicating ourselves to […]

When Can We Celebrate Thanksgiving: Prayers for Migrants, Floods, and a Bus Crash (November 25, 2021)

The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word Lord, it’s been a pleasant day, in a month of pleasant days and yet I sit here shaking my head in disbelief. This pleasant day results from a much warmer than normal month.   Was there really any progress made at […]

May Your Kin-dom Come: Prayers for Ecuador’s Prisons, Uganda, and Afghanistan’s Hunger (November 18, 2021)

Our Mother, Father in heaven. Thank you for your Presence within and through us and all that lives. Thank you for teaching us how to pray. Reveal to us who you are. We see you in the wonder of discovery like the bee expert who found 800,000 bees in an ancient British forest. We see […]

Shine Your Light: A Diwali Prayer Against Child Marriage and for COP26 in Glasgow (November 4, 2021)

May these prayers and meditations be received by You, O Lord. Take them and bind them to your will. This is the time of Diwali or Deepawali, a Hindu festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and some Buddhists in the northern hemisphere in the fall. We meditate on the spiritual nature of the victory of […]

How Shall I Pray Today: Prayers for Drought and Floods, Afghanistan’s Girls, and David Amess (October 21, 2021)

How shall I pray, today, Lord? So many topics, situations, peoples, needs, joys, and problems all clamoring for attention and my thoughts are whirling and screaming. Calm us, Lord, as you calmed the storm on Galilee for your disciples. “The world and all that is in it belong to the Lord; the earth and all who live […]

Butterfly Prayers: For Haitian Migrants, La Palma’s Volcano, and Afghanistan’s Women (September 30, 2021)

God of limitless love, Thank you for creating us with expansive capacity for love. The heart is a vast landscape. What wonder this is that we can feel so many different emotions, seemingly conflicting, at the same time, that we can love so deeply. Sometimes in the face of all the suffering we see, we confuse love […]

We Are God’s Poem: Prayers for Cuba’s Protests, Haiti, and an Iraq Hospital Fire (July 16, 2021)

“For we are God’s handiwork [trans. poiema, poem], created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God has prepared in advance for us to do.” – New International Version “We are God’s works of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he meant us to live.” – […]

Be Still and Know: Prayers for LGBT+ Equality, Africa’s Vaccine Gap, and the Heat Dome (July 1, 2021)

My mind is overloaded and whirling. My mind is blank. My rational mind is leaping from one world event, so often catastrophes and suffering, to the next of fear and injustice. A sense of overwhelming helplessness and anger threatens to engulf me. My soul whispers, “Be still, and know that I am God…. and there […]