Office Orison

No clock has been invented yet that that can measure the cycles of our emergence.

From our wakening into that first radiance of need, may each threshold we cross carry us closer to our good purpose.

Bless these bodies clustering at the crosswalks, swelling the HOT lanes, swaying together on the train. As we leave here to enter there, may our minds fall in sync with service.
May our compass point us always toward easing the troubles of fellow inhabitants of our weary planet, and yes, the planet itself.
May the motion of our hands and the habits of our minds create paths for learning, contribution, wonder.
May our gaze land on to opportunities for connection even when (especially when) our paths tangle with ones who hear another voice calling.

Bless the innumerable ways of being. The multiplicity of value, the many gifts, the pace offered and the pace chosen.
Bless the threshold moment.
Bless the delicate power of this web comprised of imagination, determination, and relationship. May it hold us to one another.
May the abstraction of the holy continue warming into the shape of good.

Bless love that keeps turning towards love. Right here, right in the places we so often slog.

May we find dropped in doorways and tucked into our pockets a clutter of talents (however ambiguous), courage (however meager), vision (however murky), cognitive capacity (however taxed), and grit (however temperamental).
May we duct tape together a patchwork lattice for our neighbors to climb.
May we ourselves find breathing room to grapple and play with all these gifts.
May we slip through the gaps and spill through rich, forgiving soil.
May we land knee-deep in that spring we barely dared imagine — but secretly hoped — coursed under our daily grind. In those rare moments we luxuriate in that lush place, may we discover ways to draw on the deep good and put it to work in the world.

We will fall short of this living hope. Indifference and fatigue will blinder us. Sometimes our collected hurts will surface all at once and we will squat right there, spreading ourselves across the corridor where the ones aching to show us the fullness of possibility make their approach.
May these moments pass through us, carrying away with them our obstinate and obsolete ways.
May their exit free us to fall into step with the movement of our shared purpose.
May we dip again, and yet again, into the current that carries us together towards Beloved Community.

Image by Matthew Henry on Burst