Praying for Peace and Justice on May 18, 2025
Holy One,
God, grant us gratitude, patience, and compassion towards our companions in the work–and the same to them, for us. Give us the courage and strength to add our voices to the choir, and the wisdom and discernment to know when to rest and let others carry the note. Give us honesty to unearth conflict, and skillfulness and humility to resolve it. May we experience this connection as a mirror of Your divine love, not only in our minds and spirits, but in our bodies. In the name of the Three in One, the original community in unity, before the beginning of the world, Amen.
Background
The Pirkei Avot, a great collection of Jewish rabbinical teachings, says, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Our own St. Paul described the church with the metaphor of our own human body, saying that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you’”, and he was even more right than he knew, as science continues to discover the ways our body systems work together to help us move through the world. And on my playlist this morning, Ani DiFranco sang (and I sang it here), “I do it for the joy/it brings/Because I am/a joyful girl/Because the world owes me/nothing/But we owe each other/the world.”
A writer whose name I unfortunately don’t remember compared doing the work of social justice to being in a choir, which requires wholehearted participation from the entire group, yet every voice isn’t holding a note at every moment. We need this connection to work for peace and justice, yet many obstacles stand in our way–from our culture of individualism to the busyness of our lives, from weaknesses in our own character to a lack of needed skills.