Peace Prayers

[Guest guest]

As we are together, praying for peace, let us be truly

with each other.

 

Let us pay attention to our breathing.

 

Let us be relaxed in our bodies and our minds.

 

Let us be a peace with our bodies and our minds.

 

Let us return to ourselves and become wholly

ourselves. Let us maintain a half-smile on our faces.

 

Let us be aware of the source of being common to us

all and to all living things.

 

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us

fill our hearts with our own compassion—towards

ourselves and towards all living beings.

 

Let us pray that all living beings realize that they

are all brothers and sisters, all nourished from the

same source of life.

 

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of

suffering to each other.

 

Let us plead with ourselves to live in a way which

will no deprive other beings of air, water, food,

shelter, or the chance to live.

 

With humility, with awareness of the existence of

life, and of the sufferings that are going on around

us, let us pray for the establishment of peace in our

hearts and on earth. Amen.

 

~~~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Page 381. (Meditations) Earth Prayers From Around the

World, 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations For

Honoring the Earth. Roberts and Amidon, Harper Collins

******************************************************

 

The challenge of the new millennium is to reunite the

secular with the sacred, the inner world of spirit

with the outer world of service. With the very

survival of people and the planet at risk, we hear the

cry for a conscious integration of spirit into

all aspects of our lives. The health of our

civilization depends continually on the enlivened

wholeness and spiritual freedom of its citizens. We

cannot address the larger issues of our society

without simultaneously freeing our own inner lives.

 

Perhaps, as we reflect back on this century, we will

come to realize that it is not enough to want to do

good. It is not enough to convince our nations to do

good. We must learn a great deal more about the wisdom

of doing good.

 

Let us enter this new age with the hope that, when we

see clearly, we will discover what the great spiritual

traditions have taught for centuries; simply that as

we enhance our inner capacity for wholeness and

freedom, we strengthen our outer capacity to love and

serve.

 

Let us pray to live from our hearts. Let us pray that

we enliven what the old Hasidic tradition defines as

dawn---that when we look into the face of another

human being and have enough light to see ourselves,

then we have awakened, then we have opened to the

living moment of compassion where night ends and day

begins.

 

~~~ Robert Lehman

The Fetzer Institute, Michigan

Page 285, (Reflections on Politics, Economics, and

Morality), Prayers for a Thousand Years, Roberts and

Amidon, Harper San Francisco