a prayer for all of us. amen.

My prayer right now for every one of us is that we can fully remember peace. Not faux peace, or a pretense, but rather the eternal peace that always lives within, no matter what storms life brings.

I’m in grief right now and, per usual, I don’t see anything good in it. Experience whispers that something good will likely come, but at this point, also as usual, I don’t believe it.

Still, there’s a lot of reassurance in the fact of having done this before. I’m an old hand at sorrow, sadness, disbelief. They’re longtime companions, comfortable, if not exactly welcome. (On the other hand, more? If I didn’t know that this is the path, that every single thing, every bit of what I call good and what I call bad, is the very thing I decided to come back for, I’d be calling for an angelic Uber. Get me out of here.)

I’ve noticed that saying this out loud opens me up for judgment from spiritual people. And isn’t that interesting? The last seven days have been a whirlwind of meeting afresh people I already know.  

For days now, the old Chicks tune, I’m Not Ready to Make Nice, has been running through my mind. But finally today, a sacred thing for a broken heart, delivered by the marvelous Luna Jaffe. Luna writes poetry (find her on Facebook) and she’s got a book about her son’s life and death coming out soon.

Her words are so delicious, so beautiful and true, that even as I relish every one of them, I also find myself thinking there’s no need to ever write again, because she perfectly and eloquently expresses it all. 

This unexpected gift from Luna arrived in the form of a Facebook post about a gathering she and her wife Amy attended. And the nugget in that celebration for me was the mention of The Plowshare Prayer, a song by Spencer LaJoye.

When I listened, I got those all over shivers that tell me something is important and not of this world. For all of us who may be struggling right now, I’m putting both the song and the lyrics here. They’re a mercy for a broken heart.

Amen for all of us, for the One of us, the divided, grieving lot of us. 

This song is a mantra for uncertain times, the very thing I’ve been waiting for. Maybe it will be a balm for you too.

Plowshare Prayer © Spencer LaJoye 

Dear blessed creator, dear mother, dear savior
Dear father, dear brother, dear holy other
Dear sibling, dear baby, dear patiently waiting
Dear sad & confused, dear stuck & abused
Dear end of your rope, dear worn out & broke
Dear go it alone, dear running from home
Dear righteously angry, forsaken by family
Dear jaded & quiet, dear tough & defiant
I pray that I’m heard
And I pray that this works
I pray if a prayer has been used as a sword
Against you & your heart
Against you & your word
I pray that this prayer is a plowshare of sorts
That it might break you open
It might help you grow
I pray that your body gets all that it needs
And if you don’t want healing
I just pray for peace
I pray that your burden gets lighter each day
I pray the mean voice in your head goes away
I pray that you honor the grief as it comes
I pray you can feel all the life in your lungs
I pray that if you go all day being brave
That you can go home, go to bed
Feeling safe
I pray you’re forgiven. I pray you forgive
I pray you set boundaries & openly live
I pray that you feel you are worth never leaving
I pray that you know I will always believe you
I pray that you’re heard
And I pray that this works
Amen on behalf of the last & the least
On behalf of the anxious, depressed & unseen
Amen for the workers, the hungry, the houseless
Amen for the lonely & recently spouseless
Amen for the queers & their closeted peers
Amen for the bullied who hold in their tears
Amen for the mothers of little Black sons
Amen for the kids who grow up scared of guns
Amen for the addicts, ashamed & hungover
Amen for the calloused, the wisened, the sober
Amen for ones who want life to be over
Amen for the leaders who lose their composure
And amen for the parents who just lost their baby
Amen for chronically ill & disabled
Amen for the children down at the border
Amen for the victims of our law & order
I pray that you’re heard
And I pray that this works
I pray if a prayer has been used as a sword
Against you & your heart
Against you & your word
I pray that this prayer is a plowshare of sorts

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Spencer LaJoye

Plowshare Prayer lyrics © Spencer LaJoye

Can you feel those words? The love in them? I hope they touch you the way they did me. We are none of us alone here. We’re connected to each other and to all of spirit, our guides, angels, and loved ones — even we we don’t feel it.

And these comforts from spirit, the assurances, arrive in such creative ways, just like the one below, which appeared out of the blue as I was starting to hit publish. One more generous holy gift from a soul brother I’ve never met, Jeff Foster.

“Never taking things personally and never getting triggered” is an impossible goal that makes us rigid and violent inside. 

The trick is… to not be perfect.

The trick is… to shine awareness more brightly into the nooks and crevices of our bodies and psyches. 

To illuminate the hurt places. The angry places. The lonely places. The vulnerable places. 

To allow ourselves and each other to be imperfect…

We aren’t “trying not to be triggered”.

We aren’t “not taking things personally”.

Those are just … ideas.

We are instead un-shaming the wounded places. 

In ourselves and each other.”

There’s more of Jeff here.

It’s okay to feel what we feel, “unshaming the wounded places.” It’s called wholeness. We came her for that, not to avoid the human experience.

Feelings are a feature of human life, not a bug. Feeling fear, anger, anxiety are as natural to the human state as feeling joy, love, and connection. And YES, we have tools to allow them to flow, to not get stuck, or to free ourselves from that when it happens, because it will. Avoidance is just another kind of stuckness, sucking up energy and distracting from the whole.

As Jeff says so beautifully in the writing above, “Heal what hurts by holding it first.” And as that old church classic says somewhere in its zillion+ pages, “judge not.”

Judge not what arises in your heart. Just love it. It is there that we find peace.

Amen.

AND an addendum, a drop-in message from spirit: much is made of my dead friend Brenda’s intense self loathing and how deeply wounded she was in life. But she didn’t just have that. It was forced on her, the cutting and destructive prayers-as-swords because she was gay… Love is the answer but not somewhere down the road. Love for all of us, right here and now, no matter what.

__________________________________________

If this Spencer’s song resonates with you, do yourself the favor of reading about them. They are remarkable. I got shivers just reading the words at the link below.

Explain the title of your album/single.

There’s a well-known Bible verse in the book of Isaiah that talks about nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. It’s this gorgeous image – this dream – of a future in which things that were once used for harm are made into tools used for growth and flourishing. Prayer can be, I think, a powerful spiritual practice. But I’ve also seen and experienced it being used as a weapon. It can be used to short-circuit grief, devalue our bodies, or re-closet us. Basically, prayer can be a means of trying to fix things about other people that make us uncomfortable. So I went into writing this song with a simple curiosity: What would a prayer sound like if it were used as a plowshare instead of a sword?The result is a “plowshare prayer.” Like a plowshare does with the earth, the song is meant to break us open (rather than break us down) and help us grow.

Spencer LaJoye Turns Prayers Into Plowshares On Their New Song