A Prayer for the New Year and a New Decade

As we step from the 20-teens into the 2020s, I invite you to meditate on the following:

Add ten years to your current age.  Then look back.  Look back to January 1, 2020, and ask yourself: Is the planet healthy?  And diverse?  And beautiful?  Are we humans healthy?  And diverse?  And beautiful?  And thriving?  Are the waters, rivers, oceans, fishes, whales the same?  Are the forests and rainforests well and healthy?  How are the four-legged ones doing?  The winged ones?  The insects?  The soil and fruit trees?

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the next ten years may be the most pivotal ones for our planet since dinosaurs disappeared sixty-five million years ago. 

I am an elder; ten years from now I will be on the edge of ninety years of age.  But what about today’s children?  The youngest among them, the teenagers, the young adults?  How will they be faring?

Clearly the news we receive daily is not encouraging with fires raging over the entire continent of Australia; with seas rising and menacing to rise even more as an ice chunk in Antarctica the size of the state of Florida is threatening to melt off into the ocean; with animal species that can’t migrate readily going extinct, etc. etc.

In that apocalyptic context, I offer this prayer.

May Homo Sapiens wake up.  Quickly.

May we meditate deeply on the specialness and precariousness of our existence on our beleaguered Earth (I recommend meditating on the picture from Voyager One that puts us and our wars and petty differences into perspective.)

May we unite across our diverse nations, cultures, religions, and attitudes (including no religion) to save our planet as we know it…including our own species.

May we awaken to Gratitude and Thankfulness for our existence and our common Mother the Earth, a unique accomplishment of the universe that took 13.8 billion years to accomplish.

May we celebrate our marvelous diversity—of race, ethnicity, gender, gender preference, young and old and big and small and music and costumes and cuisine and humor.

May we protect, cherish and learn from the nonhuman beings …the four-leggeds, winged ones, swimmers, creepy-crawlies, Standing Ones (trees), the Green nation and all the rest who share this planet with us…and whose numbers are steadily dwindling as species are wiped from existence.

May we all do community together—the common task of providing for our common home, the earth, putting its survival first and ahead of our other agendas and ideologies.

May we convert our war artifacts and economies to “plowshares” as the prophet advised so that all are fed; and housed; and have health care; and all are learning.  As Rabbi Heschel teaches: “Learning is not for life; learning is life.”

May our learning include learning wisdom and not just knowledge, the inner light that we all carry within us.

May patriarchy with its commitment to control yield to love and the light of wisdom. 

May Yin and Yang be in balance.

May the reptilian brain be tamed.  (Meditation helps with that considerably.)

May all our professions and workers learn to serve the future out of love, wisdom, and integrity.

May the young be empowered to lead and blessed with a substantive spirituality that grounds them for sacred action and may elders awaken to support and work with the young.

May those who are blind and numb to the creation entrusted to us, those who care more for wealth than for life, who choose to be in denial and ignorance about the suffering of the world, awaken to compassion and justice-making in preference to dominion.

Amen.

Banner image: Crossroads at Sunrise.. Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash.

Query for Contemplation

What is your prayer for the world as we enter the new year and decade?