PeaceBang

Prayers for a Colleague

I got an e-mail from the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association Executive Committee today asking for prayers for our colleague, the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, as she travels to Kenya to, in the words of the e-mail, “serve a larger love” as part of a three-person delegation representing the UUA and the UU Service Committee.

This e-mail touched me deeply not only because I love Rosie, but because in my eleven years of ordained ministry in this movement I don’t recall ever receiving a call for prayer from our collegial association. This is a first, and for me it represents a subtle but monumental shift away from careful, euphemistic language that for me often feels clinical and removed, to a heartfelt, unabashedly religious invitation. None of this, “Please hold in your thoughts and minds …” or “Let us join in the spirit of something that we might, if we believed in such things, refer to as ‘prayer’” or “Now let us turn our thoughts to that unity and interdependence that binds us,” — just finally, at long last, “Prayers For a Colleague.” The BODY of the e-mail uses more creative language, but it was the subject line that got me.

It’s as though we’re finally mature enough to understand that we’ll all be praying in our own fashion, and we don’t necessarily need to acknowledge that in the simple wording of one e-mail. How bloody refreshing.

I will be praying for Rosemary and the delegation’s safe travel and return in my own fashion, and hope you will add her to your good thoughts, meditation, prayers, or the good intentions you “put out” into the Universe.