Prayer Offered for March 5, 2026

Gracious and merciful God, today we ask for perseverance through the pains of our lives and a broad vision to help us transform our sufferings into new life for the benefit of others. The poet Wendell Berry invites us to have such a vision. He says:

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…

then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides,

fields and gardens rich in the windows.

The river will run clear, as we never knew it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy….

Families will be singing in the fields.

They will take nothing from the ground they will not return….

Whatever the grief at parting.

Memory… will spread over it like a song.

The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.—AMEN.

_{(“A Vision” in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry)}