Your Cleansing Breath

 

Spirit of Life,
Great immensity of love that birthed the stars
and washes through our bodies
with every beat of our hearts:

Now is the time when fall winds blow
singing through the pines
whispering through the oaks
rustling through the grass.

Open us to your cleansing breath.
Let your moving, changing winds
clear away our fear and confusion,
leaving us fresh of heart.

Let us then be ready to do Your work:
to bind each other’s wounds,
to share all that we have,
to mend the tears in the web of life.

Blessed be.

To Do What is Needed

Great Spirit of Life:

My heart is sore today, and I am lonely.
For lo, these many years I have been failing you.

This blue-green ball
that you have given us to live on,
Your sacred body,
this miracle of interwoven cycles
of water, air, earth, fire,
is heating up.

One by one we are killing our relatives:
tigers, grizzlies, elephants, oaks, otters,
whales, salmon, grasses, butterflies,
gorillas, orchids, lorikeets.

Thousand by thousand we are killing ourselves:
women and children first.

My voice is small
a whisper lost in the wind
Those who hear it laugh at me
and tell me how impractical I am
to want to find a way to live here
in love.

But please,
please:
help me not give up.
Help me receive Your gifts
and use them to save us all.

Grant me the presence of a mountain
implacable and unarguable
Grant me hope that grows like tiny tendrils of grass
after just one rain
Let me be rooted deeply and reach high, like the pine tree
flexible enough to weather the storm
Let me be as persistent as water
wearing away resistance one molecule at a time
Let me be as fierce as a grizzly bear
that I might protect all of the earth’s young
Grant me the endurance of the salmon,
the instinct to keep swimming upstream.
Grant me the vision of the hawk,
that I might see what to do next
Let me keep the wonder of a tiny child
and the joy of a baby’s belly laugh

Great Spirit,
the Web of Life is torn.
I place myself in your hands,
that you might use me to mend it.
Keep my heart full of the love that will sustain me
that I might find a way to sustain You.

Thank you for all you have given me.

Blessed Be
Amen

To Act With Holy Boldness

Spirit of Life, Source of all Love,
You who shine in every person here:

To be a member of a liberal religious community
is to act with holy boldness.

It is to affirm with our whole selves
that love matters,
that life matters,
that we can bring healing to the web of life,
if we will but love one another
and all the earth’s creatures.

It is to have passionate faith
that if we will commit ourselves deeply to that love
and stay with it for the long haul,
we ourselves become
the world we dream of.

Blessed be.

Your Cleansing Breath

Spirit of Life,
Great immensity of love that birthed the stars
and washes through our bodies
with every beat of our hearts:

Open us to your cleansing breath.
Let your moving, changing winds
clear away our fear and confusion,
leaving us fresh of heart.

Let us then be ready to do Your work:
to bind each other’s wounds,
to share all that we have,
to mend the tears in the web of life.

Blessed be.