Forty Prayers for Lent
1-God of mercy, we can’t help but feel that we have been tricked within the free conditions of this world to lose the best path of our life. We thank you that you provided us with a guide to find our way by subjecting Jesus to a forty day fast when he was made completely vulnerable to an accusing foe. Thank you that hero Jesus, did it once and for all and that he gave us the example to resist the Diablo. Amen.
2-God of ideal timing, help us who are so often tempted to mistime what we do and say in our lives. Thank you for making all things good, but giving them ideal release occasions which make them good, right and appropriate in their use for the good of our lives in community. God, as one who can get us to the right place at the right time, help us to be in-sync with the Holy Spirit as our Global Positioning System. Amen.
3-Gracious Heavenly Parent, you gave us a sibling, Jesus, who was like us in his needs, his esteem, and in having a human death date, but was obedient to the heavenly timing of his needs, his fame and glory esteem, and the purposeful way in which he was to die. Grant to us the ability to discern and obey God’s will for our lives as we seek to be ever appropriate to the times, places and people of our lives. Amen.
4-God of discernment, you gave us the example of Jesus to expose the accuser, Satan. Give us the power of resisting the accuser’s lies even as we discern the accuser attaining a personality when riding upon all the accusing voices of the imperfect diminishers of our lives who in our memories leave their echoing loud voices. Give us strength to say, “get behind me Satan, in the name of my hero Jesus,” when the accuser rides as a parasite upon the memories of all our lives’ worst moments. Amen.
5-Loving God, help us not to despair of perpetually missing the mark toward the target of perfection. Help us to know that if we are aiming in the right direction with our life activity, then your angels will carry our falling short efforts to the mark on the wings of God’s grace as we can only be complete in you. Amen.
6-O Divine Just one, how can we know where to aim the words and deeds of our lives unless you give us a model? Yes, you did in Jesus give us a model, to inspire us to apply love and justice to all the activities of our lives. Amen.
7-O God, if I could see you, touch you, and hear you, I’m sure that I would make idols out of such sensorial contacts and pretend to capture mystery in a bottle to add to my museum of mystical experiences. Let me accept the traces of your mysterious touches in the guise of the ordinary and know that I cannot limit or contain you as I accept that I and everything else are contained in you. Amen.
8-Eternal Word as God, through you, I know you even as I am a linguistic cipher within the total lexicon of the Divine Eternal Word. Let the words of my life and body language deeds articulate the fact that through Word as Communication, the Eternal Word is always communicating. Amen.
9-Divine Christ, you are All and in All, and when you took bread and said, “This is my body,” you showed us that your presence did not end at your skin so that you are bread and the entire world which enters your purview. Help us not to limit your presence to bread and wine and Bible, since these cannot exhaust You who are All and in All. Amen.
10-O God, we love your showings in familiar places but we also like the surprise, “Peek a boo,” occasions when you appear without our knowing or even practicing to be prepared to greet you. And when we smile without knowing why we smile, we thank you the uncaused one for the delightful touch. Amen.
11-God, deliver us from perfectionism, especially when we judge others who are not gifted in the areas where we are gifted. And deliver us when we are attempted to bemoan the fact that we are not perfect and falsely presume that we should be in the place of the perfect one. Help us not to take on the role of omni-competence in self-reliant presumption so that we don’t hold ourselves responsible for something we can never be, because that role has been ever held by Thee. Amen.
12-O great God, help us to know that you contain us, more than we contain you, because we live and move and have our being in you. Give us grace to make love and justice the practice in our lesser environments located in your great Home of all that is. Amen.
13-God beyond all, help me to accept my limited capacity and the provisional insights which come to me on the path to receive perhaps, more surpassing insights tomorrow. Amen.
14-God of involvement with all, let me not demand of you final answers about anything, but adequate answers to the moment of need. Amen.
15-O God of beauty, let me be but a shard within your grand kaleidoscope, turning in time and being perpetually rearranged with all other shards, to give you a pleasing view. Amen.
16-O God, remind me how natural it should be to be humble, with an infinite number of things all being in infinite number of relationships and with each person having a vantage point on a very limited number of things. So, why God, am I tempted to over-value my very partial view when the realization of this should make me unavoidably humble? Let me have the grace to be but a member of your orchestra blending to the glory of the One God. Amen.
17-O Spirit of God, are you the literal breath within? Are you the invisible wind blowing the trees? Or are you behind the metaphor we must use to refer to the mystery of the animation of life itself? Amen.
18-God, we endeavor to be awe struck fans seeking the divine autographs to be written on things as a proof like a tag on a product stating, “Made in and By God.” Amen.
19-God of greatness, while we want your signature to stand out in particular things, you perhaps are saying to us that all things are your signature. And with our prayers we acknowledge that we are signed, sealed and delivered by you. Amen.
20-O God of discerning rebuke; teach us not to use intercession for others as a guise for us confessing for them, the sins which we think that they have. Amen.
21-God of wisdom, please forgive my worry based upon the assumption that I can know and invent the problems of the future before they happen. Please transform my anxiety energy into calm wise planning for probable outcomes and not worst-case scenarios. Amen.
22-O God, with the arising of Jesus within a human family, you made it natural for human words and knowing to be valid ways of knowing you. And you gave us hope for empathy by showing us that our experience is relevant to understanding all beings. Amen.
23-Creator Genius God, like each unique snowflake you have made each of us unique in personal constitution and experience, and such uniqueness can also be experienced as being quite alone. But who is more unique than you? And through you we can experience the choir of other unique beings and proclaim that we are mutually unique with each other. Amen.
24-God of creativity, thank you for stamping each person with singular uniqueness so that from the mist of personal aloneness creativity can arise to bless the community. Amen.
25-God of comfort, when I feel that nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, let me be reminded that nobody has known the joys, the smiles, and the love that I have known in precisely the unique ways in which I have known them. Help me to balance the uniqueness of my troubles with the uniqueness of my joys. Amen.
26-God, forgive me of the arrogance of thinking that I have thought of things which you haven’t which result in the events of worry. When my worry is but thoughts without any empirical verification, please teach me to value myself so that I don’t choose disaster for my mental entertainment. Please transform the thoughts about future probabilities into intercession for others and wise planning toward beneficial outcomes. Amen.
27-O God, you are synchronous with all becoming, you have subjected us to the binary of time, events of either before or after. And with each “after” event we mark our age and note the differences between who we were before and how we are after and we can fall into regret of what we were not before, or nostalgia of what we are not now. Give us grace to accept the continual flow of the before and after and to embrace transformation as the God given action of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
28-Forgive us God, when we have been fickle within the crowd, and when it has been safe to shout “Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in God’s name.” But in another crowd, we have been crying, “Crucify him,” when we have been involved in the victimization of those who are already suffering. Give us discernment when we see those who have been made victims, and give us the courage to support and stand up for the wrongly ostracized. Amen.
29-Lord Jesus Christ, how often we would like to keep you as an “external” icon to gaze upon or as a story in the Gospels. Let us accept our identity with you and let your Christ nature see through us, pray through us and act through us. Amen.
30-Bless Holy Trinity, who is unavoidable as a Father Plenitude from whom we came, live and will return to. Who is Jesus the Christ, to assume human life so that we might assume knowledge of divine life in a valid way. Who is Holy Spirit as the omnipresence allowing us to conduct mutual experience and know that we are not alone. We bless you, O unavoidable Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
31-Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you for giving us the Eucharist as a meal to promote the future gathering of your expanding family. Keep us loyal to the family meal, and let us not forget that this meal is connected with the needs of the hungry people of our world. Amen.
32-God of all people, you have made us feel so welcome, we can in our privilege think that our religious experience is more valid than those who equally claim the dignity of Christ. Give us grace to open our hearts to all who want the equal dignity of Jesus Christ. Amen.
33-God, you have funneled knowledge of you to comply with our human smallness, but with that wonderful knowledge you have given us the ability to surpass what we ever thought that we could be. Thank you for being Word made flesh in Jesus; please dear Word of God, be made flesh again and again in us. Amen.
34-O God, our heavenly parent, you have given us your Son Jesus to help us be formed into a family with a new identity. Give us a love of our identity with the life of Christ who lives in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
35-Gracious God, we look forward with hope for the return of the excessive use of the praise word of the Easter celebration. As we have fasted from the unique Easter praise word, let our lungs be ready to return to the Easter excess of holy noise in praise of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Amen.
36-God of all praise, prepare us for the intensity of Holy Week, when we will recount the final week of the life of Jesus in his earthy body. Let the remembrance of these events be dynamic so that their power can be made manifest again in us in new events of remembrance. Amen.
37-Christ, to be in you, is to erase the ego of lesser identities, like ethnic, gender, and social and economic differences. But to be in you is to uplift to equality people in their differences to know that you delight to dwell in each person in giving everyone a sense of an original experience of you. Amen.
38-Lord Jesus Christ, in your death on the Cross, you showed us that God suffers with us in our lives even to the suffering of death. We thank you that you preserved genuine freedom, by allowing the worst of all to happen, even to your Son. We ask that we might be shocked by the worst that happens to be inspired to overcome evil with good through your blessed example. Amen.
39-God of all Patience, we wonder why you tolerate so much in life, even as we know life would be all programmed outcomes without genuine freedom. Help us to respect freedom so much that we would in the democracy of freedom, cast our votes for goodness, so the goodness will finally win the day. Amen.
40-God of our Easter destiny, you call us during Lent to our Easter of hope. We thank you that hope, itself, received a wonderful story in the resurrection of Jesus. We thank you that Easter hope always gives us a future, in this life and the next. Amen.
