God, I give you thanksfor the people in my life who cannot see,including my mother and father,who teach me to listen,smell and taste and feelevery alive surface of the world, and for friends who cannot hearand make an orchestrafrom all the other senses. I pray for patience with thosewho use “see” to mean understand,“vision” for… Read More
Saturday Prayer, January 16, 2021
( reflecting 1 Samuel 3) God, you who want to wake me,shake me, and just have someone to talk toin the middle of the night, I pray gratitude for the Eli’sin my life, the so-imperfect people,who were poor parents,or poor judges,who made mistake after mistake,avoided naming injustice,missed God-moments in their own lives. Yet they were… Read More
Saturday Prayer, January 2, 2021
This is the story about this picture, a picture I call “comfort and joy.” It is a porta potty at a building site near where I live, halfway between Crossroads House, the shelter for people who are unhoused and the downtown of Portsmouth. Work has stopped on the site till spring, but they have left… Read More
Saturday Prayer, November 28, 2020
(Thanks so much to Scott Marrese-Wheeler for his photograph from Hidden Farm Road outside of McFarland, Wisconsin. He quotes Neena Verma, “Twilight, the only time of the day when the light and dark meet and become one.”) God, it is the twilightof the liturgical seasonsand today my Pentecost is a heap of ashes waiting for a… Read More
Saturday Prayer, November 14, 2020
(This photograph shows what my friend Nancy Donovan has created for a feral cat who has been coming to her porch for food and a safe place to sleep for a couple years. This cat cannot bear being indoors with the other cats or near a human. Nancy writes, “Every year I make her a… Read More
Saturday Prayer, September 19, 2020
God, I need a bigger bra. I actually have wanted to say those words all my life. I lost (most) of my lockdown pounds, so I was not expecting changes of that kind this late in life (snow-kissed hair, quilted face), and I wasn’t going to risk trying bras on. I took the __… Read More
Saturday Prayer
God, I am packing my heart-lunch with the smiles of the morning – the enthusiastic beagle crotch-licking the window hanging ramshackle until I fix the cords, the outrage of simultaneous acne and wrinkles, the breeze that brings birdsong with a hint of skunk, the raccoon at the bird feeder, an adolescent wild turkey strutting unaware… Read More
Saturday Prayer, July 25, 2020
God, the hummingbird is waiting while the butterfly drinks, and I don’t think that the hummingbird is kind, or patient or irritated, or any of the many of my feelings when I wait. This morning I pray for everyone who waits — one for a COVID-19 test result, one to re-schedule a cancelled flight, while… Read More
Saturday Prayer
from Isaiah 55: 6-13 God, I give you thanks for trees that clap their hands, and rejoice at pterodactyls, very good bacteria … perhaps good virus. I celebrate armadillo and chigger, and that coelacanth, a Lazarus taxon, supposed to be extinct for 66 million years, is swimming today. I am grateful coelacanth’s waters now are… Read More
Saturday Prayer
God, some I know make a hard rowing today, storm-tossed by worry, grief and doubt, trying to control the compass of the future. Others are in safe harbor and have heard the “peace be still.” Some have come to summer solstice and others are in winter beauty. Some are waking still full of Juneteenth good… Read More
