A Prayer of Return to Equality of God's Goodness by the Rev. Dr. Laura Marie Piotrowicz, Rector St. John's Anglican Church, Lunenburg (Canada)
Over the waters of chaos, the Spirit of God hovered.
Through the energised Spirit, God named all things into being.
Into all the gifts of creation, the Breath of God was given.
And God created humankind: God loved us all into being.
And God saw, and said, that it was good.
Yet we have veered from this goodness, as we have failed to celebrate the holiness of God’s diversity.
Someone said that our biological organs determine our societal worth; and we believed them.
Someone said that our uniqueness made many of us ‘bad’; and we believed them.
Someone said that our very existence justified abuse; and we believed them.
We are diminished by these beliefs; we suffer when any beloved child of God suffers.
We are diminished when a beloved of God is denied the fullness of life.
We are diminished by structures and systems that perpetuate violence and oppression.
So we pray for liberation for ourselves: from our distorted beliefs, from our perceptions of justified inequality, from inadequate theologies of greater and lesser humanity.
We pray for liberation for our brothers, sisters, and siblings: for children forced into marriages, for adults suffering economic discrimination, for obstacles to gender-related health care, for everyone who recalls micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions and everything in between.
We pray for liberation for the world: for those who cannot imagine another way, for those who cannot create another way, and for those who strive for another way.
We pray for all your children, loving God. We pray that we may be brought back to the full knowledge of You: of your love that births beauty, of your energy that dances throughout all your creatures, of your breath that gifts us with life, of your names that affirm our connection,
of your declarations of goodness. Bring us back to you, we pray.
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