A Prayer for the Nebraska Board of Education

A Prayer for More
By Rev. Debra McKnight

Oh My Lord,
Religious people, are making You look so mean,
all wrath and venom,
all punishment and sin,
a line in the sand not a bridge over trouble and difference and distance.

A reason to disown, dress-down and dismiss;
A reason to fear and fret and intimidate;
A reason to divide and conquer,
control and prescribe how another life, body and being should take shape.

I am so mad and tempted to join the fray
How do I show up without doing the same,
heaping hurt and bile and pain.

So much hurt in the Healer’s name,
So much salt in the wounds we keep making.

“How long, Oh Lord,”
we sing with the Psalmists, who saw it all before.

How long until we can embrace the sacred that is seeded within,
the Great Love that whispers in a still small voice
and arrives with healing in Her wings,
the greening that brings life to the dry and dusty recesses of our being,
sending a cacophony of grace that at last breaks through to a true and just harmony.

Oh My God, grant us the courage to Love with a true and right spirit,
Love that is not control or conquest but tenderness and connection,
Love that hopes all things, believes all things and endures all things.

Grant us the courage to love ourselves,
our internal enemies, murky regressions and pulsing fears,
our sacred growing pains.

Grant us the courage to love our near-ones and our dear-ones,
the ones we don’t know and the ones we don’t want to see,
make our they into we,
them into us,
with healthy boundaries that bridge us and bid us forward,
Until at last we sing loud and proud in Your All-Loving chorus.
May it be so, Amen.