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Last Updated: Sep 8th, 2009 - 08:07:52 |
"God, if you exist, please help us to live in comforting balance with each other's feelings.
Help us to grow in tender desire and gentle love for each other.
But help us also to know that wherever there is desire there is fear, wherever love, hate.
Please help us to keep the fear from driving out the desire, the hate from killing off the love.
Help us to cherish these opposites as they live within us all.
And help us not to expect too much, but not to give up all hope;
Not to be ashamed of the bitterness we sometimes feel toward the world and each other, but not to fall into total cynicism;
Not to be unrealistically naive, but not to make a fetish of present-moment 'practical' reality;
Not to live too much in the realm of our fantasies, but also to know that our fantasies are real as well.
Please help us to find some serenity with each other and tranquility in this world,
To live in peace with each other and the world some of the time,
Knowing that to live in peace we must accept the travail and conflict that dwell beside it, that even sometime bring it about.
Help us to know that the balance we seek is delicate, fragile, and sometimes unpredictable,
That it may be eased into place by indirection, but destroyed by direct sledgehammer-sober effort.
And God, while you're at it, help us not to take life so seriously all the time, as in this prayer."
John Ohliger, 1976
© Copyright 2004 John Ohliger.org
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