The Shalem Institute posted this today on FB. It is a local spiritual resources group that I first began following about 20 years ago.
A friend who lives in a smallish desert town in California said it was published on the front page of their local newspaper today also.
Sunday Prayer-
And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised,
and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
Earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, the people joined together again.
They grieved their losses and made new choices and dreamed new images
and created new ways to live and heal Earth fully,
as they had been healed.
~Kitty O'Meara
Amen.
I know that most of you are not into simplicity when it comes to church or praying, but prefer all the bells and smells and different colors of vestments etc.
But, simple can be good too. ;)
This little poem expresses something of what Katherine said about how maybe a silver lining in this crisis might be a new way of living for the over-rushed, over-materialistic, over-stressed rich western countries.
Simplicity or Latin? If it ain't the latter it don't matter.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Anne! Very Unitarian!
ReplyDeleteIn my view, churches that want 10 percent of my crumby retirement income owe me a good "show" of art, music, incense, poetry, and architecture. And maybe a decent cup of coffee in the parish hall.
But my religious yearnings were formed 40 years ago by reading library books about the saints and spending time alone in what I now understand was a kind of proto-prayer.
God heard me. Or I heard God. Whichever, it wasn't growing up with a lot of religious trappings that pulled me in and made me pull up my socks and try to live "love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself."
The bombardment of indoctrination and rules crammed into 9 months of Inquiry/ RCIA, and the worship of liturgical "correctness" has nearly pushed me out again.
I stopped going to Mass in February when rumors of the virus were on the horizon and parishioners were militantly clinging to hand-holding, the communal cup, and holy water.
I went back to prayer, Scripture, and literature. Tolstoy has made good company in my spiritual and viral desert. Through him I found the prayers in the Orthodox Trisagion service, which speak to me. https://www.goarch.org/-/the-trisagion-service
Unitarians are great stealers of other people's traditions ...
I know little about Unitarians. Sound smart - steal only the best from the other traditions. :)
DeleteUm, well, they are a very mixed bag. The church I grew up in was rather congregationalist in flavor, more Unitarian than Universalist. But in the 1960s, a lot of flakey new ideas started to get added. In the 1980s, once they stripped all references to God out of the by-laws so as not to offend the agnostics and atheists, who used the church to give them a patina of social respectability while sneering at "believers," that was it for me.
DeleteProblem with Unitarians is they make big decisions at 7 a.m. breakfast meetings while their other-church partners are still appointing committees to investigate the subject. But they always decide in favor of the angels.
DeleteThe poem is nice. I don't see it as a prayer. But it something hopeful to ponder. (Come to think of it, it is fairly close to our pastors sermon -- taped -- today.)
Lovely prayer.
ReplyDeleteI like simplicity, but I also like liturgical traditions. Though clouds of incense I can do without (a cloud of witnesses being preferable!)
I hope at least that we don't waste our lessons in involuntary simplicity.
There are some pleasant thoughts in that piece. If you don't mind my saying so, God gets a little short-changed.
ReplyDelete