Prayer for a Wounded Heart

PRAYER FOR A WOUNDED HEART

Divine Beloved: Prayer is as near to me as breath, and 

as essential to serenity. Among the sages of Aquarius 

and higher planes a few claim such enlightenment they 

find no reason or necessity to pray. They say that in 

creation you gave into our possession a messiah – 

everything required for joy and peace and celebration. 

I believe this, yet today in all my striving I have failed to 

find that placid, eloquently silent place within. My faith 

has been waylaid, and on this unfamiliar path are 

self-reproach and bitterness, and the abyss, and in 

despair I turn to you and pray,

O Father-Mother, vouchsafe to me a map of my 

divinity, and a light for navigating in the dark, 

and a song of angels I can follow if the 

candlewick should sputter and the flame 

go out.

Divine Beloved, they say my thoughts make my reality, 

advising discipline, as if directing fishes of the seven 

seas to swim the currents differently. But, God, when 

I would fix my mind on Heaven, I find that it resists. 

Ideas steer themselves amiss and wander into hostile 

territory, taken and held captive there. And when the 

world in its contrariness seems alien, perverse, and 

perilous, I turn to you and pray again,

O Father-Mother, it is but my dread betraying 

me; it is my fear that weighs me down. God, 

vanquish these, my ancient enemies, and in 

the Canaan where they staked their frail and 

tentatively faithful claim, create anew in me a 

clean heart and a keen and ordered mind 

subservient to it.

Divine Beloved, they say the universe is love and 

nothing else exists. But, God, sometimes it seems that I 

am knocking on the universe’s door and no one opens 

it; nobody heeds my urgency; and I, afraid and lonely in 

a cosmos wrought of stone and haunted by imaginings 

of isolation, turn to you and pray for your embrace. 

O Father-Mother, save me from this emptiness. 

Out of the pit uplift me now, above the 

skirmishes and struggles that beset me, 

phantoms of my own anxiety that tug at 

me along the porous edges of my 

consciousness. Raise me to the heights, full in the 

sun, with vision unobstructed, such that I might 

see the allness of the Holy One, the nothingness 

of specious images (which are but errant 

thought’s invention), and the eternal, honest 

truth of love.

Divine Beloved, they say, Follow the cynosure of your 

bliss. But, God, sometimes I don’t know where it is or 

even if I’d recognize it if it met me on the wayside, 

scrambling as I tend to do from this amusement to 

that glittering distraction. I am ill acquainted with it, 

having been too long at sea, gone far from home upon 

an odyssey productive only for what it failed to find. I 

feel ashamed then and unworthy of Creation’s gifts. 

Thus it is I turn to you and pray, 

O Father-Mother, for me you have made nothing 

less than paradise; I am designed for glory, 

guided to release in poetry and song whatever 

music I possess, my poverty of spirit fed, my 

brokenness repaired and blessed abundantly, my 

soul’s treasury enriched according to your 

promise and my glad acceptance of it. For all this 

I am watchful but I need not search; it finds me 

where I rest and dream. 

Thus, Beloved, am I grateful now for what the 

harvest yields today, for tender life emerging 

through hard winter’s crust, for buds whose 

promise comes in measured time, unrushed 

among earth’s orchards, gardens, fields; for 

nature’s generosity to be revealed: great, arching 

trees in full leaf and in flower, however faintly 

scented now, appearing yet in shadow or 

in silhouette.

This is the dawning of the new day, and I, 

impatient for the unrestraint of morning over 

the horizon, sunbeams dappling the stream and 

warming field and forest, had much better feast 

my senses on the songbirds’ predawn crescendo, 

on evanescent drops of dew that settle only to 

evaporate in scented puffs of mist from wild 

grasses tender with the season; on pink and 

pale-blue streaks the sky dispatches forward, 

heralds of the coming glory, summoning the 

sentient created beings, each as witness to the 

ordinary signs and wonders that unfailingly 

appear. Then the watchers gather to give praise 

and thanks, seek mercy, receive healing, and 

turn their faces eastward, where the miracle of 

day ascends and radiates the sure and certain 

light of grace.

Amen.