Where do prayers come from?

Where do prayers come from?

Prayers come from anywhere: inside yourself, outside yourself, and usually both. There’s no “right” or “wrong” about prayers or praying. There are, however, different prayer types and, in as much as prayers reflect the pray-er (the person praying), pray-er temperaments.

I tend to live a pretty structured existence, so it works well for me to let prayers simply bubble up or happen along; I’ll jot down notes as ideas appear or when I hear snippets of things. Then when I sit down to plan worship I fashion prayers using the scripture and theme for each Sunday as the pattern and my collection of notes as the fabric.

O Christ, thank you for making us a queer church!

Thank you for giving us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,

including the beautiful rainbow spectrum of sexuality.

Thank you for encouraging us to change the things we can,

like how we view ourselves in the mirror,

or the way we see ourselves in the eyes of others.

We give you great thanks, O Creator Divine,

for those of us who are transgender,

for those of us who are lesbian,

for those of us who are straight,

for those of us who are bisexual,

for those of us who are gay,

and for those of us who don’t like categories.

We thank you, Ruach, for calling each of us not to be perfect,

but to be perfectly who you formed us to be:

females who act like boys—or like girls—or are just being ourselves,

males who appear feminine—or masculine—or are simply comfortable in our own skin.

Let it be.

Short is better than long, and variety keeps things interesting. I tend to be long-winded, so my challenge is to stay focused and write what I mean and, when speaking, mean what I say. There are key themes that I repeat in my prayers, but I try to re-word them so they don’t become dull; even familiar phrases from scripture I might re-phrase in hopes of hearing them afresh.

My father offered this ABC prayer at my high school baccalaureate service:

Dear God, help me

accept myself,

better myself,

commit myself.

Amen.