OPEN MY EYES, LORD.
A prayer.
Many decades ago, my wife bought a book, called NEW PRAYERS, written by a French Roman Catholic priest, Michel Quoist. These prayers are unequaled in beauty and tenderness. I have attempted, falteringly I should add, to compose such a prayer, reflecting on the present perilous period. My gut feelings tell me that today’s conditions resemble what Jesus describes in Matthew 24.
My Prayer.
Open my eyes, Lord, to see beyond the waving trees, beyond the racing clouds, the world as it is developing before you return.
Now, when I scan the world’s newspapers, all I read is of war and turmoil, schools bombed and young women killed, leaders assassinated, with hardly a mention of the innocent bystanders, the ruptured families, the homes destroyed, the trees eradicated, the soil utterly soiled.
Open my eyes, Lord, to see, beyond what the pictures show, the good being done by the struggling few, the meals given out, the hesitant hoes in tiny garden plots, trying to wedge out the weeds, attempting to provide sound food for stomachs eager to forestall the long-distance trek from countries far away.
Open my eyes, Lord, to fathom the curse of today’s table, stacked with ultra-processed products, advertised in the name of nutrition, but benefitting the large corporations, and the world of advertising, while filling the corridors of the houses of healing.
Lord, it is not easy to be a Christian today, our efforts to live the Life of wholeness, the way of Truth and equity, as the bombs fall, and the drones dazzle, and the precision-guided weapons reach their targets, directed from darkened corners, faraway, impersonally manoeuvred, powered by Artificial Intelligence. It’s all so unreal, so inhuman, so mechanical.
Lord, it’s easy to be a Christian if we expect to go to heaven, eager to leave this wicked earth behind, sporting these white, dazzling robes, on the shores of the Sea of Chrystal, after having depleted the earth of its essentials, filling it with our toys and killing machines.
Lord, it’s hard to be a human today. It’s hard to be a loving person. It’s hard not to pollute, it’s hard to love the world, for whose total redemption, whose complete restoration you gave your bruised body, after suffering your entire life.
Lord, when will you come back? You promised that, for the sake of the saints, the time of suffering will be shortened. Is my daily prayer of Maranatha, uttered in vain?
Lord, you have granted me many, many years of life, and a wonderful quintet of offspring, all happily married, as I was, all having beautiful children and children’s children, all well-formed and prosperous. How do I tell them that, according to the Bible, all life will suddenly, abruptly, without warning, end?
Lord, we now live in these ending times, where, rather than carefully cherish the creatures you allowed to develop, today war and revolution, strife and disarray, dominate the world and destruction and elimination rule, and with it what we euphemistically call, collateral damage: families torn apart, historic sites vanished, soil forever poisoned, cattle crushed, and the list goes on.
Lord, we now live in these ending times, where having children becomes a rarity, where villages vanish, where culture collapses, where insecurity increases, where a magnified fool on a golf-course, rules the roost and, literally calls the shots, setting off a cascade of crimes.
Lord, we now live in these ending times, in times where the weather feels the uncertainty and magnifies its erratic outcome, where the air loses its purity, where the oceans heat up and angrily accelerate the formation of ever more deadly disasters.
Lord, will we ever learn? Will the roaring winds, the multiplication of increasingly stronger hurricanes and tornadoes, give us pause to reflect and wonder why?
Lord, is it possible to imagine the real future, when faith will be sight, when you return to ban the maladies we have created: the inequality, the few billionaires, the many paupers, the privileged us – me included – and the many others, often destitute and without vision?
Lord, have we, as church, brought the wrong message? Have we, as collective Christians, failed to prepare us for an eternity where the lamb and the lion loiter together, glorifying in Your presence? Have we, as Christian Community, succumbed to Religion, the pious do’s and don’ts, and, perhaps, forgotten, or perhaps shunned your command to love Creation? Have we avoided your message to embrace LIFE and that to full, LIFE in Capital Letters, engaging mind, body and soul in a continuous collage of experiences, seeing and feeling, observing and embracing your Holy created World in her entirety?
That’s what our future is. For that you promised eternal life. Do we really desire that, as we wallow in wealth already?
Open my eyes, Lord, to expect and embrace your future: New Heavens and a New Earth where ‘righteousness’ rules.