O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears—tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger—anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace.

Amen.

-Bishop Eugene Robinson

Sigh. I loves me some openly gay episcopal bishops. “O god of our many understandings” sounds to me much larger than any sort of rinky-dink god-in-church-on-Sunday. Not even “god,” so much as that-which-we-invoke in times of large experience, where we put our hopes, our shared pleas.

It’s a container for all of us, whether we’re drawn to the inestimable or pulled to that which we can measure; whether we’re believers in this holy tradition with the singing and the soaring words; or that one over there with the funny hats; whether we’re radical non-believers who worship only trees or ideas; or we’re strictly wait-and-see spiritual sorts; whether we keep faith with the rational, the theoretical, the testable—hold the miracles, please; or we take our blessings where we find them, in the smell of our lover’s hair and the clean joy of strawberries.

It’s the recognition that millions of people coming together creates something larger than the sum of all those lives; a power greater than wars or hurricanes or bursting bubbles, bigger even than bungling leaders or bad intentions.

Yes we can.

Yes we did.

Yes we will.

Prayer via, image via.

Yeah, I’ll just bet he will, lady.

Ugh, this election is turning me into a mean-spirited mocker of the intolerant (which is its own strain of intolerance—I know! I know!), but watch this and tell me you don’t want to slap the jesus off her froggy little face.

Sigh. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world, but first I have to cut a godly bitch.

Thanks, Graceful Flavor.

First off, I have no skin in this game.

But I’ve had a tangled skein of reactions to the recent PZ Myers cracker desecration episode, and I thought I’d try untangling them here. The basic gist of the matter is this: Webster Cook, a college student in Florida, took a communion wafer out of mass, leading to a vast overreaction—including death threats and accusations of hate crimes—on the part of the local church and its more unhinged believers.

Then two known provokers jumped into the mix: Myers, the PT Barnum of atheism, who blogged that it was “just a frackin’ cracker,” and volunteered to joyfully desecrate the host, if he could just lay his hands on one, and Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, the church’s highest holy rolling lunatics, who set his soldiers against PZ, trying to get him fired. Oh, and menaced his life, and the lives of his family. It was a good old-fashioned god & country dust-up, complete with desecration and death threats. The blog traffic and TV time for both gentlemen has been boffo, so kudos all around! (more…)