Lengthen the light and
decrease darkness –

Lengthen reaction
between word and anger

 

May my eyes be bright with your beauty,
bright enough to discover your strangeness

May my tongue be quick with your praises
quick enough to tell your wonders

may my hands be strong with your service
strong enough to demonstrate your goodness

May my ears be alert to your voice
alert enough to hear you in voices of sorrow and quietness

May my senses be keen to your presence
to see your world and glorify your word
to lend my self to your compassion
and listen to your storied truth-

May I grow with you.
Amen
(JJ)

We are at the morning of the year; and so just as we try to spend time in prayer each morning, let us now renew our determination to deepen our relationship with God in this coming year; and as morning prayers let us pray to that divine presence whoever or whatever we conceive divinty to be:

This morning and this year may I delight in the knowledge that you are with me

This morning and this year may I cease from anger and resist irritation

This morning and this year may I delight in the knowledge that you are with me

This morning and this year may I refrain from judgement and self righteousness

This morning and this year may I delight in the knowledge that you are with me

This morning and this year may I shake off laziness and make the most of my talents, not hiding my light but offering to share the gifts of your spirit whenever I can

This morning and this year may I delight in the knowledge that you are with me.

Holy Creator and Spirit of all;

We come in earnest approach, to learn how better to find peace with your peace;

we come in humility – we come all too aware of our flaws and our many failings;

give us your guidance to pray with sincerity as we come to you today.

However we may be troubled by our lack of faith remind us

that you do not expect us to be perfect, and you delight in forgiveness.

However lost we are, may we remember that it is not we who seek you but

you who seeks us out.

We remember that you are not impressed with achievement or possessions,

with pomp or ceremony, with grand architecture, fine decoration, rituals or

offerings, but truthfulness, honesty, justice, goodness and simplicity,

so help us to come quietly to ourselves before you,

help us to put down our burden of expectations,

help us to put down our defensiveness and piety

so that we can admit the truth of ourselves,

and be open to your healing power.

O nameless one; Holy one of many names;

in faith we come to worship you, as far as we are able – if we are able to at all.

In humility we accept that we cannot describe or understand our inkling of your presence but still we come.

In honesty we confess that we do not know how our prayer may reach you and yet we do pray.

Our prayers in their weakness gather strength from unknowing.

 so in truth we pray;

God of our hearts, be near to us in our uncertainty.

Make Your Self known to our hearts and our innermost spirit, make your power felt in forgiveness; make Your presence clear in compassion; make Your virtue clear in truth.

As we are able to recognise our own weakness and the faults of our ways; and the mistakes that we have made become clearer to us here, so we ask to understand the power of Your love as forgiveness – may we feel Your forgiveness and compassion.

May we understand ourselves, forgive ourselves and move on – transforming our weakness by your strength, and may we begin this transformation by beginning to forgive others.

Amen…

May the promise of your peace remind us that all is yet well, despite the burdens we may bear, and the anxieties that are yet to pass. May our weakness and our failings find forgiveness and as we find peace may we find also the strength to dismiss the failings we are so quick to judge in others. Amen

We pray for the health of all those members of our community, we pray for those who struggle daily with anxiety, worry, depression and unease. It is rightly said that in a fractured society being well adjusted is no sign of health. Let us remember those whose ill health reflects the chaos of the world around us – the world that we have, in part,  made so. Let us determine to find peace so that we can advocate peace, let us come to acceptance so that we can accept the way things are, let us begin to find peace with uncertainty and acceptance of unknowing.

Holy One; we pray for your peace – we pray to be able to pray. We pray now to move in you to dwell in your thought and to fall in amongst your ways. We pray simply that our prayer may be simple; we pray that the meaning of our prayer may be to have meaning. we pray in sincerity and truthfulness – we pray for sincerity and truthfulness. wholly one of us bear witness now as we search. let us drop our guard for a while let us understand ourselves in faith and truth let us simply be in quiet prayer and reflection for a short spell…

Oh timeless spirit. We know you best when we stop trying to define you and find you most easily when we stop searching for you. Lead us to the knowledge that you are to be found amongst us, remind us the teaching which we find so hard to learn, that we must love you in ourselves and so doing recognise you in our neighbour, and in the one we think is our enemy. Teach us the way of your spirit, the way of collaboration, of co-operation, participation, reconcilliation and forgiveness. Remind us the old ways of community and the new language of open source, teach us to give freely and share openly, let us be forgetful of self and mindful of the other. 

Let us recognise the sacred wherever we encounter it, let us be aware of the divine as it really is; present all around us, let us see ‘that of God’ revealed in the world and made manifest in the ways of the world, and let us ensure that we make manifest in our thoughts, words and deeds, the best and the highest of which we are capable. Amen.

In faith we come, in confidence that this great love which breathes us, supports and sustains us; and never fails or rejects us, is the life and spirit of all that we can see or know; and so we pray.

We must accept that we will not always understand and we face hardship and suffering as we struggle through our unknowing.

Give us strength to sustain despite our weakness, clarity to see through all our confusion, and hope in the darkness.

We pray for our brokenness we pray that the flaws of our natures and the flaws of our bodies do not invalidate our acceptance of ourselves but rather we remember the words of St Paul who said that ‘when I am weak then I am strong’.

We pray for Forgiveness, we pray that we may view with mercy the weakness in our hearts and minds and the failure of to live up to our aspirations. We pray for love to resolve the burden of anger and resentment to release us from the captivity of anger and grief.

We know we are not perfect, we know our faults are many and we know that amongst them is the weakness of finding faults in others. let us here resolve to forgive.

May we begin to forgive ourselves and may our forgiveness shine out onto all those around us. May we assume the best of intentions, forgive the small infringements and set the liberty of all as our highest aspiration of happiness. May we forgive.

Amen

Spirit of Life and love, we come once again to be reminded of the reality of your presence in our lives; we seek your stillness and peace, your presence and grace in this holy place. At this dark and bitter time of year let us be conscious of your warmth and light, the comforter of our tumultuous and divided time.

May the promise of your peace remind us that all is yet well, despite the burdens we may bear, and the anxieties that are yet to pass. May our weakness and our failings find forgiveness and as we find peace may we find also the strength to dismiss the failings we are so quick to judge in others. Amen

Prayer after a flood:

As the rising and the falling of the tides remind us of the tides of our lives, let us remember also all we have to be grateful for; for the cool clear waters which we drink and the cleansing waters in which we bathe. We re grateful for the rain no matter how strongly it bursts in on our lives, the drenching that we receive and the earthy smell of creativity and turned earth and the reminder that it gives us of our mortality and our fragility. May we be forgiven for our hubris and complacency for imagining that our meager forces are stronger than those of nature, or that our human nature is more important than that which is greater than human. May we be forgiven for our lack of humility in thinking we have all the answers or even know the questions, may we recognise instead our insignificance in the face of immensity. May we recognise our actions and begin to look at what we can do to re balance our lives and reduce our contribution to the unsettling of the natural order. May we not punish ourselves for what we cannot do, nor grieve over much that we can do so little but may we be bold in faith and free in love.

Lets join together once again in prayer,

We pray for those who suffer, we pray especially for the children. We pray that our folly and greed in the world have contributed to wars and unrest, to kidnappings and bombings and all the many terrible ways in which children are separated from their parents. We pray for the suffering of that soul which must bear every loss, and pray for forgiveness that such losses can be borne. We pray for the lost, we know that You are with the lost child as you are with the suffering parent, we pray for those who suffer.

We pray for the power of Love.

May the truth which is in this truth – and the light which shines in this light –                                                   and the world which is becoming in this moment – and the blessings of the life which is within this life  –  be upon all those beloved; all those who are unable to be here but who are with us in spirit,  and whose memory we honour by using the gifts which they taught us   in pursuit of the true life we seek.

Eternal Spirit of our true life, We pray for your peace. We pray for the peace of your spirit in our hearts. We know that all conflict begins in the human heart, we pray for the peace of your spirit in our hearts.

We pray for Justice, we pray for release from oppression and the terror of slavery, we pray for freedom for our human potential to be realised, the potential for love and joy, for creativity and completeness.

We pray for Forgiveness, we pray that we may view with mercy the weakness in our hearts and minds and the failure of to live up to our aspirations. We pray for love to resolve the burden of anger and resentment to release us from the captivity of anger and grief.

We know we are not perfect, we know our faults are many and we know that amongst them is the weakness of finding faults in others. let us here resolve to forgive. May we begin to forgive ourselves and may our forgiveness shine out onto all those around us. May we assume the best of intentions, forgive the small infringements and set the liberty of all as our highest aspiration of happiness. May we forgive.

 Let us join together in prayer, let us enter in to this time and this place, in fellowship and in truthful humility. Let us acknowledge our shortcomings, let us ask forgiveness. We come not in the knowledge that we are right – but in the hope that we may be forgiven for our faults, not in self-righteousness or certainty but in humility and in the sincere desire to understand ourselves, each other and whatever we can know of God. To this end we ask now for Your accompanying power, Your gentle truth and Your abiding grace. Since You may always be found amongst the least, help us to accept our weakness, to recognise ourselves in the weakness of others and find the love you represent in all the broken places within us; all the failures, and all the regrets we bear. We gather to re-inforce ourselves and resolve to bring our witness to the sacredness of all life to a new focus in the coming week.