A Prayer for Earth Day

I serve on the Earthwise committee at St Paul's United Church of Christ. As part of our leadership of this morning's Integrity of Creation Earth Day service, I was asked to prepare the call to confession. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Creator, let us open our eyes to the tears in the fabric of creation and the suffering of our human and non-human neighbors caused by our way of living in the world.
Dear Teacher, let us open our minds to see the connections between escalating disasters and the energy, economic, and power structures that are driving them.
Dear Life-Giver, let us open our imaginations to the possibilities of abundant life available if we reject the status quo.
Dear Father-Mother, let us open our hearts to our brothers and sisters—Anishinaabe and Dakota, Somali and Vietnamese, monarch and red-tailed hawk, lady slipper and white pine—so that we may live in thriving community with them as you intended.

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Thanks to the creativity, passion, and dedication of the rest of the committee, the pastoral team, and a powerful and inspiring sermon by David Weiss, the service was wonderful. It was both a beautiful celebration of the wonders of creation and an urgent call to action to honor our place within the web of life and turn the status quo upside down and inside out so that all our neighbors, human and more-than-human alike, may live abundant lives in harmony with each other.