Friday, September 1, 2017

Prayer: I thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit




Lord, today and every day, I thank you for the gift of your Spirit in me and in the world. Your Spirit can work in me with a soft but insistent voice, telling me that my life is empty and meaningless, but that there are chances of a new life waiting before the door of my inner self to fill its void and to conquer its dullness.  Your Spirit can work in me, awakening the desire to strive towards the sublime and against the profanity of the average day.  Your Spirit can give me the courage that says “Yes” to life in spite of the destructiveness I have experienced around me and within me.  Your Spirit can reveal to me that I have hurt somebody deeply, but can also give me the right word that reunites the other with me.  Your Spirit can make me love, with the divine love, someone whom I profoundly dislike or in whom I have no interest.  Your Spirit can conquer the sloth towards what I know is your aim for my life, and can transform my moods of aggression and depression into stability and serenity.  Your Spirit can liberate me from hidden enmity against those whom I love and from open vengefulness against those by whom I feel violated.  Your Spirit can give me the strength to throw off false anxieties and to take upon myself the anxiety that belongs to life itself.  Your Spirit can awaken me to sudden insight into the way I must take our world, and can open my eyes to a view of it that makes everything new.  Your Spirit can give me joy in the midst of ordinary routine as well as in the depth of sorrow.  Your Spirit can create warmth in the coldness I feel within me and around me, and can give me wisdom and strength where my human love towards a loved one has failed.  Your Spirit can throw me into a hell of despair about myself and then give me the certainty that life has accepted me when I felt totally rejected by others and even when I rejected myself.[1] I thank you for the gift of your Spirit. Amen.



[1] Based upon Paul Tillich, Eternal Now, 1963. 
 

 
 



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