Our family is taking time daily to pray about the current global health crisis. Our prayers will likely reference the Christian tradition, but we’ve written with an ecumenical and agnostic audience in mind.
If you’d like us to pray for you, let us know. If you’d like us to write a prayer for you or for a concern you have and share it here, just ask. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, and we won’t share it or any other identifying details about you here or elsewhere.
Today we pray for people experiencing losses related to the passage of time: missed opportunities that will not return.
Today we pray for people who are missing life events that will not return.
We pray for those who cannot share the first days of their child’s birth with their extended families and their friends.
We pray for high school seniors who will miss the rituals of prom and graduation.
We pray for those for whom all the rituals of adulthood–getting a driver’s license, getting a first job, preparing for college–are now delayed.
We pray for all those for whom the lasts–the last day of school, the last day of work before retirement–happened without their knowledge.
We pray for those celebrating birthdays and anniversaries–especially milestone ones–without friends to celebrate with them in person.
We grieve with others canceled trips to see old friends or new places, pilgrimages that won’t begin, and family reunions that will be delayed–and, for some, not celebrated.
We pray for those we don’t know and for those we do, including [names of people we know who are grieving lost opportunities].
We recognize that sadness of these losses, not the life-shaping grief of losing a loved one but the challenge of making sense of what life is when we expected and yearned for it to be different.
Our hope for for peace of heart, acceptance of that which is hard, compassion for those who feel this sadness acutely, and lives of meaning.
Above, Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie (Maternal Tenderness) by Vigée Le Brun, (1786) shows a mother and daughter of perhaps 6 or 7 years old embracing. The little girl hugs her mother’s neck, and the mother holds her daughter around the waist. May we be as tender to each other and to ourselves.
Family Foxhole 