on prayer | 19

One of the greatest gifts of this past year has been the continued prayers and encouragement I have received from Father Martin. This is one of the prayers he sent my way: words that have taught me, and continue to teach me, how to pray.

Father of all; I pray for my sister that she may not feel alone.

Yes: she must feel alone, and learn to love that aloneness before she can love at all: but I pray that she knows she is loved in that aloneness, that all-one-ness, in which You are the Lover: and the Beloved. And may her ache for that oneness never go away: until You bid it leave.

May she keep her sweetness through all this: her sense that there is a rightness to things; and a roundedness, and a resounding sense of the rightness of her place in Being.

And may she not lose her edge; that slight bit of tartness that sharpens our savour for more, that purifies with its astringency the puff and the pretense of so many of the rest of us.

May her purity and her passion continue to be a beacon to those of us who need it always but always manage to let it go astray.

And may - for our sake, and Yours - and hers - she find, day after day, the strength to live with it: to live with herself : in You.

With thanks for my sister: in Christ

Amen.

(Father Martin Johnson)