Remembering the Children...

April is National Child Abuse Prevention month

We use this month as a call to action for all of us to change the way we think about the prevention of child abuse and neglect and focus on actions that protect children right from the start, so child abuse and neglect never occur. We want all our faith-based partners to join each other and us in offering a special prayer during your services from April 5 - April 7, 2013. Imagine the power of all Connecticut’s faith communities offering a single prayer or intention to end child abuse!

For more information, visit: www.covenanttocare.org

~ Covenant to Care for Children ~

A Prayer:

God of all creation, you do not distance yourself from the pain of your people, but in Jesus bear that pain with us and bless all who suffer at others’ hands. Look with compassion upon all who suffer from child abuse and with your cleansing love bring healing and strength to them. Open our hearts and awaken our minds to act on behalf of these children, that by your justice, our world might become a haven of peace and safety for all. We ask this in the name of the one who transforms our lives, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (by the Rev. Ann Fontaine, SCLM & the Rev. Kurt Huber)

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A Prayer in the wake of the Sandy Hook Tragedy
“Grieving our Lost Children”

O Lord, another brutality, another school killing, another grief beyond telling . . . and loss . . . in Colorado, in Wisconsin, among the Amish, in Virginia, California and Connecticut. Where next?

We are reduced to weeping silence, even as we breed a violent culture, even as we kill the sons and daughters of our so-called ‘enemies,’ even as we fail to cherish and protect the forgotten of our common life.

There is no joy among us as we empty our schoolhouses; there is no health among us as we move in fear and bottomless anxiety; there is little hope among us as we fall helpless before the gunshot and the shriek and the blood and the panic; we pray to you only because we do not know what else to do.

Loving God, we beseech you to move powerfully in our body politic. Move us toward peaceableness that does not want to hurt or kill; move us toward justice so that the troubled and the forgotten may know mercy; move us toward forgiveness, so that we may escape the trap of revenge.

Empower us to turn our weapons into acts of mercy, to turn our missiles into gestures of friendship, to turn our bombs into policies of reconciliation; and in this deep work of transformation, hear our sadness, our loss, our bitterness.

We dare to pray our needfulness to you because you were there on that gray Friday, and watched your own Son murdered for ‘reasons of state.’ Good God, do Easter! Here and among these families, here and in all places of brutality. Turn our Good Friday grief into your Easter joy. We pray in the Name of the one crucified and risen, who is our Lord and Savior. Amen.

(adapted from Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008), 61-62.)