Contemplative Focus
Prayer For Our Fragile Planet
Contemplative Focus
Prayer For Our Fragile Planet
This year as I drew my billet for Pentecost I thought about the possibility that I would receive, once again, the gift of Counsel. It happened for the third year in a row that Counsel is indeed to be the gift upon which I focus this year. So this time I decided to spend more time with the meaning of the gift and was thrilled to read in Don Goergen’s book, Fire of Love: Encountering the Holy Spirit, that the gift of Counsel can be viewed through a lens of collaborative energy and interconnectedness. This has been such a revelation and in this Pentecost Octave and in the celebration of the Trinity I have prayed with this great web-nature we all, all living beings, share and how very interdependent we are, one to the other.
As I am sure we all have witnessed, with growing concern, the reports of one natural disaster after another I have been more and more focused in prayer on the huge issues of climate change and the increasing devastation these recent storms have caused. We have been warned for years that as our planet’s delicate balance is threatened we can expect dire consequences. It’s not just a matter of isolated violent storms or heat waves or drought but every prayer from our hearts regarding these occurrences can actually be focused on justice—because it is always the poor and marginalized as well as our plants and animals who suffer the most and who lack the voice to make their plight heard in the din of it all. Obviously we all pray for those whose lives are most impacted by the horrendous events of the last several years yet within our spheres of interconnected creation our deep prayer for our fragile planet and all living ones can radiate a new and growing awareness that we are participants in creation—that the very intentionality of contemplation will set us within the pulse of life, the pulse that reflects the heartbeat of God.
Sr. Leah Hargis, ocd
Baltimore Carmel
