[Vision2020] Gene Robinson's Prayer Kicks off Inaugural Events

[Tom Hansen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWWAnitUCw4

With special thanks to Joan Muneta for providing the text of this 
invocation.

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"Good afternoon,

Before this celebration begins, please join me in pausing for a moment
to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

Oh God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with
tears, tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less
than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and
raped for wanting an education, and thousands die a day from
malnutrition, malaria and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger – anger at discrimination at home and
abroad, against refugees and immigrants; women, people of color; gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy simplistic answers we prefer to
hear from our politicians instead of the truth about ourselves and our
world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges
of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will
be fixed any time soon and the understanding that our next president is
a human being, not a messiah. Bless us with humility, open to 
understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced
with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine
respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every
religion’s God judges us by the ways we care for the most vulnerable.
And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the
office fo the president of the United States. Give him wisdom beyond
his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership
style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr.
King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady calm
captain. Give him stirring words, we will need to be inspired and
motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to
facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color blind reminding him of his own words that under his
leadership there will be neither red nor blue states but a United
States. Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on
that experience of discrimination that he might seek to change the
lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy and help him remember
that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his
daughters’ childhoods. And please God, keep him safe. We know we ask
too much of our presidents and we’re asking far too much of this one,
we implore you oh good and great God to keep him safe. Hold him in the
palm of your hand that he might do the work that we have called him to
do. That he might find joy in this impossible calling and that, in the
end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity
and peace.

Amen."

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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