How do we plant seeds of hope as we cross the threshold of a new presidential tenure, which represents a season of loss and harm for so many? One answer is to find nourishing individual and communal spiritual practices that will cultivate resilience within our lives and within our community.
Last Sunday, in our multigenerational service we shared the following message about prayer followed by a candle lighting ritual, which invited us to commit to countering racism, militarism, poverty, and environmental degradation.
We share the words again below, so you can read them, and to invite you to consider lighting candles at home on a daily or weekly basis – a ritual of recommitment to promoting some of our faith values:
Why do we pray?
When we are feeling sad, scared, confused, angry, and alone, prayer is a tool we can turn to as a community. While prayer alone will not fix things, prayer allows us to turn inward to share in a spiritual practice that helps us to feel more grounded and centered when life has us feeling disoriented and off balance.
It helps to name our troubles and losses in prayer, and to hold them in our hearts. When we name our sadness or anger together in community, we discover we aren’t alone. We discover there are people who want to listen and who care for and with us about the trials in our lives and in the world around us.
In prayer, we can also name where we notice love at work, or hope planting new possibilities, or joy being experienced. When we name these things in prayer, they can also lift our spirits high.
Prayer is a place to hold all that happens and all that we hope for, not to appeal to someone else to change things for us, but to cultivate the change we seek in our own hearts.
Candle lighting Ritual:
Spirit of Life,
We make space to acknowledge that the three evils Dr. King named: racism, poverty, and militarism are with us still and to lament the fact that these ongoing evils have contributed to ecological injustice. Spirit of life, be with us now as we light candles of repentance and hope, naming these evils and committing ourselves to the spiritual task of combating them.
We light our first candle to acknowledge the pain and violence of racism. We honor and mourn those whose lives have been lost as a result of this evil, from enslaved ancestors to civil rights leaders like Dr. King to those killed by police violence in our own communities. We commit ourselves to the work of equity and liberation and to dismantling white supremacy.
We light our second candle to acknowledge the evil of poverty. We honor and mourn those whose lives have been lost at the hands of greed and overconsumption, those who go without the basic human rights of food, shelter, and healthcare, including our neighbors right on the church’s doorstep. We commit ourselves to the work of radical hospitality and economic justice.
We light our third candle to acknowledge the evils of war. We hold in our hearts those who have lost their homes, loved ones, and lives in ongoing military conflicts. Today we pray especially for those in Gaza and light a candle of hope that the recent ceasefire agreement and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners is the beginning of a new era of peace in the Middle East. We commit ourselves to the ongoing work of nonviolence and peace.
We light our fourth candle today with sorrow for all that has been lost due to climate destruction, and with prayers of hope for the resilience of the earth and all that we can still save. Our hearts are especially heavy as the death toll continues to climb in the California wildfires, with 27 people having lost their lives and thousands more their homes and belongings. We commit ourselves to honoring our earth and protecting her resources, including one another.
And our fifth candle we light for the cares of our own community, acknowledging that the work of building beloved community starts at home, and that we are more resilient when we can come together to share our burdens and multiply our joys.
For these things and all that we hold on our hearts this morning, we pray. Amen.
At the end of our service, we also made time to imagine together what we need to plant in the soil of our lives to build the beloved community. What do we need to give? What do we hope to grow? Thank you to all who participated. Please take the time to look at the image with this column and again when you next come to the lobby of our sanctuary.
There is another chance to join a weekly spiritual practice this Friday, which will be the 200th online Vespers Service. Many thanks to all the lay ministers, ministers, and volunteers who have so mindfully tended this space of reflection and renewal. Here is the link.
We will continue to offer myriad ways for all of us to be grounded and centered and lifted in the days ahead.
In faith,
Rev. Alison Miller & Danielle Garrett