If We Choose To Pray

If we are going to choose to pray to God, let's not direct our prayers to the Divine for Boston, for the Red Sox, for the Marathon, or for any other thing that doesn't breathe.

Let's direct our prayers to God for people. Let's pray for 8 year old Martin Richard's family and friends and classmates and teachers at school. Let's pray for the families and friends and communities of 29 year old Krystle Campbell,  graduate student Lingzi Lu, and MIT police officer Sean Collier. Let's pray for the hundreds of people who cling to life, whose limbs were lost, whose lives are shattered. Let's pray for the helpers who run toward chaos instead away from it. Let's pray for any and all of the people whose lives have been physically, emotionally, spiritually violated, because they were at the Marathon, or heard about it, or live or lived in Boston, or feel connected to it because something in them hurts when others do. Let's pray for the people whose hearts move swiftly from a necessary desire for justice to a seething desire for vengeance that God comfort their pain with a loving-kindness that tempers the hate and anger and hurt they feel. Let's pray for people whose souls and lives are so broken that they seek not to build, but to destroy.

For justice, for mercy, for healing, for consolation, for a Shelter of Peace, for hearts and souls all around us.