COVID is coming

Everyone wrote prayers as COVID and lock down approached. 

This was the one I wrote and have been praying.

23 March

God of the Cosmos and the ocean

The great wide and deep calls us

Yet we are sent into our smallest spaces, our walled safe places.

May the tracing of the sun and the rhythm of the day

bring our bodies into greater stillness.

As we practice being together apart,

Guide us how to reach out with the heart.

We experience this truth- our lives are not our own.

Even without touching, we are held in the hands of others,

and in these hands our future is held.

Loving God, you are near, nearer than our heart beat, closer than our breath.

Jesus, to this day your hands bear the scars of steadfast, costly love.

Spirit of Grace, reach into our lives now,

that we could reach out with our own,

not with hands but with hearts;

not with a hug, but in word;

that the invisible threads of deepest caring

could bind our solitudes into embrace,

and the earth and humanity be blessed.

In your name and to this world

we commit ourselves afresh to love and always love.

Amen.

COVID is coming

16 March

Richard Browning

 

Last week our PM talked of going to the footy. And Hillsong.

Haven’t seen much of him since.

Everything has changed.

COVID is coming. 

The airport is empty- eerie empty.

Just outside a tree is full of birds.

Noisy. Laughing. Playing silly buggers. Joking. 

Excited that the day is minutes away from breaking.

Maybe they always do this.

They spend no time worrying for tomorrow.

Tiny invisible fragments of DNA, not even living material

is bringing us back.

COVID draws us back

to dawn and a shared reality -

our shared entwinned interwoven interdependent ecology of inextricably connected sum of all things.

Where this connection has always been abundant and beautiful and mysterious

and ignorable

now it holds terror.

Our lives are not our own –

never have they been our own.

We all need to be infected again

by dawn

and the sum of all connected things

and the day which asks of us all, what have we to give?

This life, which is not ours to own is bound to the birds, and the day, and others and all others,

and fragments of non-living things.

(Image: photo taken of a Taize tea-light prayer candle, early in the morning 24 March)