Let us arise to the sound of your voice, the sound of justice, kindness and humility, the lure of love in a language utterly ineffable and yet tangible. Let us arise to the sound of your presence, “I am who I am,” a mystery unfathomable, and yet held within our bodies. Let us arise to the sound of wonder: a gentle whisper and a thin silence, a canopy of divine love in the realm of awe.
Let us arise to the melody of your sacred calling that destabilizes our carelessness and points us to the yapping urgency of a heart-centered life that longs to be lived. Let us arise to the “longed-for tidal wave of justice.” Let us arise to a world where “hope and history rhyme.”[1]
Let us arise to a kind of divine hope, “beyond the face of fear,”[2] where the obvious cruelty of this world and its leaders can be upended as you call us back to the truth that our well-being is intertwined with the person to our left and the person to our right.
Let us rise to our spirit that guides us to the bone-deep knowledge that we belong to one another. Let us arise to our spiritual inheritance that the cries of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger are the cries of Christ, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.
Let us arise your spirit in our midst on the days when the chronology of our bodies weighs heavy, our mortality ever reachable, time moving forward without us doing anything to help. And let us arise to your tender spirit on the days when the “ghost of loss”[3] makes the world spin and tilt and list.
Let your spirit rise in Oklahoma amid wildfire, and Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas amid tornados, in Haiti where a hospital is burnt to the ground, and in Yemen where airstrikes brought death.
Let your spirit rise when the world’s cruelty is obvious, and the familiar feeling of exhaustion and cynicism makes all the world feel powerless in the face of injustice. Let us arise to your compassion, to your eyes open to the possibility of mercy.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. Arise to meet us, Spirit of the Living God. Be with us. Incline your ear. Bend toward us. And hear us as we pray together the prayer you teach us: Our Father…. Amen.
[1] Seamus Heaney
[2] Lucille Clifton
[3] May Sarton
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