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.
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