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Date: 3 September, 2010
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'There is so much that your creation can throw at us.'
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Surefish Prayer for September
O God, we rage against the suffering and pain.
So many lives lost across the world in disaster upon disaster.
Waters flooding through homes and turning them into stinking chaos and putrid tombs,
earthquakes shattering walls and limbs,
droughts that scrape the last vestiges of hope off the land and leave only the swirling dust and despair,
fires that swarm across the hillsides and swallow communities.
There is so much that your creation can throw at us.
And it is so often the weakest and poorest who die first.
Instead of games and laughter, children are left to scrabble in the rubble in search of vanished parents.
Instead of secure years of rest the elderly find themselves turned into refugees plodding with horror at their backs.
Where finding shelter, safety and food was already the work of alchemy, parents sit in their rags and weep.
Where communities and nations were struggling free of debt and despair there is the oppressive weight of too much loss again.
How we long for a world of safety and of peace!
How we long to see everyone thrive and every field flourish!
How we wish it could be different!
And we feel the anger and the shock too often, see these scenes too often, dig deep too often to provide a tiny gift of hope to broken people in a world of pain.
And we will give again.
We will find, even in harder times, something to share.
But does it have to be so bad?
Can’t you take this fragile world and make of it a safer home for us?
And are you angry too?
Do you flee the earthquake’s assault and the fire’s cruelty, made homeless with all who lose their homes?
Do you make your camp in the wilderness where once a city stood, cradling your children as they stare across the ruins and weep for all that has been lost?
Do you stare with the anguished farmer at the searing sun and let the sterile dust trickle through your fingers?
Do you wait in agony with the crippled victims of the chaos for some relief to come?
Do you wade waist-deep in filth to try to find a loved one in the dark?
Do you sit beside us as the appeal comes on the TV?
O God; yes!
Yes you do.
For everyone who perishes as nature groans is cherished.
Every name is known.
Every hope and dream matters and every loss is awful to you.
You who have tasted the agony of the garden and the hopelessness of the cross never turn aside.
Your embrace holds all our weeping.
You rage, too, at the endless suffering.
Fragility is the companion to our freedom.
And we are the ones who can refashion a world in which no one need be so weak and far from help that natural disaster cannot be faced.
So help us, dear God, to keep on giving and working for the world you are calling into being even now.
Give us your Holy Spirit’s power and inexhaustible hope.
This reflection and prayer has been written by the Rev Neil Thorogood, Director of Pastoral Studies at Westminster College, Cambridge. Neil teaches pastoral theology on all the academic programmes and also has particular interests in the visual arts and theology.
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