Gracious and loving God, be with us as we learn to praise all that our life entails.
Help us to praise what comes,
surprising as unplanned kisses,
all we haven’t deserved of days and solitude,
our body’s immoderate good health
that lets us work in many kinds of weather.
Help us to praise
talk with just about anyone.
And quiet intervals, books that are our food and our hunger,
nightfall and walks before sleep.
Praising these for practice,
perhaps we will come at last to praise grief
and the wrongs we never intended.
At the end there may be no answers
and only a few simple questions:
Did we love? Did we finish our task in the world?
Did we learn at least one of the many names of God?…
At the ragged edges of pain, did we catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
Gracious and merciful God, be with us as we learn to praise all that our life entails.—AMEN.
(The Light of Invisible Bodies by Jeanne Lohmann)