A prayer for Christmas morning
AT A carol service last Sunday, hosted by the first Open Table community in Liverpool, we heard this prayer, which was moving, inspiring and too good not to share.
It’s a prayer for Christmas morning produced by enfleshed.com, a website which provides a resource ‘that addresses honestly, tenderly, and directly, the beauty and pain of living enfleshed lives.’
Look around.
The Sacred has collided with the flesh.
Holiness incarnates.
The Spirit of Christ has come.
Wars still rage. Hunger persists. White supremacy continues.
The joy of Christmas does not shield us from betraying one another,
from building walls, from shunning queer love or normalizing misogyny.
And yet.
And yet.
Here in the midst of it
God is with us.
As close as our own breath,
as deep as our longings,
as intimate as the love we share,
as present as our hunger, our pain, our pleasure, our touch.
In the middle of a world swirling with chaos,
something new is born.
Something that turns us towards each other,
that will keep us dreaming of an economy
that doesn’t profit from the poor,
that will make us proud of queering notions of love and relationship,
that will give us the courage to disrupt the lies of white supremacy,
that will help us stay soft even when things are so very hard,
that will remind us how powerful Love can be when it is channeled in the direction of collective liberation.
Today, we are reminded that we don’t have to look very far for the source of our hope.
We just have to pay attention. Close attention.
Listening carefully in the midst of all the noise.
Letting wisdom bubble up from within.
Moving at the pace of God, not of production.
Take courage. Linger in the mystery. Look anew at one another.
Christ has come. All flesh shall be set free.