A Prayer Service

As I went through all of my books in the last week, trying to weed out a good third to half of my collection, I found all sorts of interesting notes, cards, and pictures lodged between the covers of many of the books.

I found this script for a prayer service I wrote and led on October 2, 2001, just a couple of weeks after 9/11. Different faculty members read the alternating verses.

Faculty Meeting Prayer Service 10/2/01

Opening Reflection

Reading: Mathew 22: 36 - 39

Teacher: Which commandment in the law is the greatest?
Jesus said to him: You shall love the Lord your God
with all of your heart,
and with all of your soul,
and with all of your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
And the second is like it:
you shall love your neighbor as yourself...

This is the Gospel and the Word of the Lord...

Response to the Reading: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

We are a good people...Terrorists have cells...well, we need to become cells of peace. It is not enough to defend ourselves against violence. The greatest antidote to violence is that we pro-actively create fields of non-violence, fields of peace. (Marianne Williamson)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Martin Luther King Jr., said we have a power in us more powerful than the power of bullets. The power of love can be harnessed...Prayer is a conduit for miracles...Love dismantles hatred. (Williamson)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

It is not just enough to say "God bless America." We must say, "God bless the world." Colin Powell has said we must listen to other cultures and respect other cultures in a way that has not been characteristic of American foreign policy. (Williamson)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

We should not condemn others because we do not like their political system. We can always talk to them. we must try to speak to the goodness that is in people. Nothing is lost in the attempt. Everything may be lost if we do not work together to save peace. (Pope John XXIII)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Peace is the tranquility in the order of all things...The peace of humankind is ordered harmony. (St. Augustine, City of God)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it. (St. Thomas Aquinas)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Intentions

Concluding Prayer

And I thought to myself as I re-read this service, that even though I had no recollection of writing it - I find the words as timely now as they were in the aftermath of that fateful tragedy.

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