Rooms of Hope
Sunday Collect – March 13, 2022
David Galchutt, The Blissful Alignment
COLLECT
A recap/summary of the week’s prayers and contemplations
MONDAY
We learned from Oliver Twist that hope wants more.
TUESDAY
We witnessed a hope that asks questions.
WEDNESDAY
We gave a blessing of hope in beatitudes for strangers in a strange land with Rob Bell.
THURSDAY
We found hope floating above the clouds.
FRIDAY
We discovered that hope comes in every size.
SATURDAY
We reflected back through our week to examine our hope.
PRAXIS
Chapter eleven of Hebrews is called the Hall of Faith by many bible scholars.
But as I was reading it this morning, I noticed that just when the writer has captured our attention by inflating all of our hope into a rising bubble of reassurance, he then pierces it with verse 13: All these people died in faith without receiving the promises…
But then the anonymous writer wisely and softly defines hope without ever really saying the word:
…but they saw the promises from a distance and welcomed them. They confessed that they were strangers and immigrants on earth.
Those who practice hope live knowing they are strangers and immigrants here on earth because they live their lives in rooms that exist in other realms.
A good practice of hope is to write your own Hall of Faith. Jot down the names of people who
My list consists of all the people who never got to experience the true freedom God created us to possess. It includes relatives who died without seeing the racial reckoning I’m experiencing today. It also includes ancestors I never met who died enslaved in the fields or in the era of Jim Crow.
But I’ve also added onto my list my heroes: Harriet Tubman, Sister Thea Bowman, Helen Keller, Howard Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Thomas Merton, Dr. King, Mamie Till, Sandra Bland, Nina Simone… and so many more.
My Hall of Faith is long. It’s lined with infinite rooms of hope.
THE LORD’S PRAYER FOR JUSTICE
By Father Ron Rolheiser
[God in Heaven] who always stands with the weak, the powerless, the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the aged, the very young, the unborn, and those who, by victim of circumstance, bear the heat of the day.
[Your reign] where everything will be reversed, where the first will be last and the last will be first, but where all will be well and every manner of being will be well.
May we always acknowledge your holiness, respecting that your ways are not our ways, your standards are not our standards.
May the reverence we give your name pull us out of the narcissism, selfishness, and paranoia that prevents us from seeing the pain of our neighbor.
Help us to create a world where, beyond our own needs and hurts, we will do justice, love tenderly, and walk humbly with you and each other.
Open our freedom to let you in so that the complete mutuality that characterizes your life might flow through our veins and thus the life that we help generate may radiate your equal love for all and your special love for the poor.
May the work of our hands, the temples and structures we build in this world, reflect the temple and the structure of your glory so that the joy, graciousness, tenderness, and justice of heaven will show forth within all of our structures on earth.
Give life and love to us and help us to see always everything as gift.
Help us to know that nothing comes to us by right and that we must give because we have been given to.
Help us realize that we must give to the poor, not because they need it, but because our own health depends upon our giving to them.
Give not just to our own but to everyone, including those who are very different than the narrow us.
Give your gifts to all of us equally.
Do not let us push things off into some indefinite future so that we can continue to live justified lives in the face of injustice because we can use present philosophical, political, economic, logistic, and practical difficulties as an excuse for inactivity.
[May] each person in the world my have enough food, enough clean water, enough clean air, adequate healthcare, and sufficient access to education so as to have the sustenance for a healthy life.
Teach us to give from our sustenance and not just from our surplus.
Forgive us our blindness towards our neighbor, our obsessive self-preoccupation, our racism, our sexism, and our incurable propensity to worry only about ourselves and our own.
Forgive us our capacity to watch the evening news and do nothing about it.
Help us to forgive those who victimize us.
Help us to mellow out in spirit, to not grow bitter with age, to forgive the imperfect parents and systems that wounded, cursed, and ignored us.
[Thank you for not] judging us only by whether we have fed the hungry, given clothing to the naked, visited the sick, or tried to mend the systems that victimized the poor.
Thank you for sparing us this test—for none of us can stand before this gospel scrutiny.
Give us, instead, more days to mend our ways, our selfishness, and our systems.
Deliver us from the blindness that lets us continue to participate in anonymous systems within which we need not see who gets less as we get more.
Amen.