Peace, all.
Here's a Christmas Eve prayer for this year (or for whenever). Use or modify as you wish in your houses of worship, or at home--don't as you don't. If you don't mind, cite this page if you do use it. It'll help me out as I continue to publish around.
I pray you're all well.
Peace, love, and liberation.
Tom
Prayer of the Day, Christmas Eve
Written for Carthage College Christmas Festival 2023 by Rev. Thomas R. Gaulke
It is for the sake of the hopeless that your hope is born,
desiring, shaking, crying, and afraid.
For the magi and for the shepherds.
For the hungry and for the poor.
For the oppressed and for the persecuted.
For the downtrodden. And for the beaten-down.
For Lazarus and for Mary.
And for the oppressed-by-legions, yet unnamed.
For every victim of every war.
Searching and traveling and struggling.
Filled with faiths and finding ways and speaking in tongues
that so many refuse to ever understand.
Chasing after angels and apparitions unknown,
premonitions and prophets and stars.
Desiring, shaking, crying and afraid:
it is for the sake of the hopeless that your hope is born.
By your dim fire.
Fragile and in the night.
They arrive.
And they are warmed.
Warm us, too. With your hope;
that, in times of violence, we might hail you, Prince of Peace,
that, in times of hate, we might laud you, Lord of Love,
that, in times of separation and alienation, division and condemnation,
we might name you: Jesus, Immanuel (God With Us, the One Who Saves),
closer to us than we are to ourselves,
beating in our hearts,
living in the flesh of every neighbor,
crying out in each of the “least of these,”
inviting us to worship by loving one another
and by embodying together your justice and goodness in the world.
It is for the sake of the hopeless that your hope is born.
May we find it here.
And may we carry its warmth into the cold.
Amen.
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