Prayer
O God, who hast manifested thyself in lives of men and women who have honestly lived and died, give us today some deep measure of insight and of understanding. As we participate in the perspectives of this hour of worship, help us to gain a new vision of the hurrying events of our crowded days. Free us from pettiness and foolishness, give us the wisdom to discern the deeper issues of our time, and give us the power to meet the obligations they place upon us.
We are grateful, O God, for home, family and friends, for our studies and work, for the green world, blue skies and pure air thou hast given us despite our poor stewardship of these gifts. We thank thee for all the beauty that we may see and feel and touch and know; and the skill and the science to put it all to meaningful use. We thank thee for high thoughts, happy days, after feeling and hope of peace, and a faith that looks through gloomy days toward a larger life.
Help us, O God, to use our education and our faith to achieve a commitment about life, upon which we may act; bring us out from behind our words to responsible action, bring us out from behind our rhetoric to truth.
Help us to express our prayers in action o God. Make our humble-honest-real actions be a form of prayer in the midst of our increasingly polarized community, Help us to reach the hearts of persons for whom justice is a club and those for whom it is a ploy and a scapegoat. Help us to reach the hearts of those who have never learned to love, and those who have stopped loving.
Lord God Almighty, purge our land, we beseech thee, from the secret power and the open shame of great national sins. From dishonesty and corruption, from cruelty and violence, from vainglory and Towers of Babel, from covetousness and impurity, from stupidity, intolerance and intemperance which give birth to many crimes and sorrows – purge us and deliver us, our children, and our children’s children into a land and a time blessed with the truth of thy love – through Jesus Christ our Saviour.
Reverend Samuel Slie
Battell Chapel