A PRAYER BY PADRAIG O’ TUAMA

Debbie McKenzie, Mar 20, 2021 • 5 min

Prayer (to ask): Can be a rhythm that helps us make sense in times of senselessness. Not offering solutions, but speaking to and from the mystery of humanity. Prayer is rhythm, prayer is comfort, prayer is disappointment, prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire.

So let us pick up the stones
Over which we stumble, friends
And build altars
Let us listen to the sound of breath
In our bodies
Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices,
of our own names, or our own fears.
Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug
Let’s lick the earth from our fingers
Let us look up and out and around
The world is big and wide and wonderful and wicked
And our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full of meaning
Oremus
Let us pray.

These are the kinds of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted of the damp blanket of bad stories of belonging that moves us towards each other, not from each other. Ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together. Ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree. That deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need, this is what will save us. This is the work of peace.This is the work of imagination.