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Today we return to the writings of Walter Brueggemann and to a prayer he shared in 1988, the words of which seem to speak to so much of what we see and experience around us today.

Our mother tongue

We have learned to speak almost every language except our own.
We are well schooled in the language of hate
                and of fear
                and of greed
                and of anxiety.

We know the language of domination and of excessive deference.
We understand completely the grammar
    of liberalism and conservatism,
            rhetoric that is revolutionary and reactionary.

But we are strangers in a strange land.
Teach us afresh to trust our mother tongue of praise and grief.
We thank you for our speech teachers,
    of many mothers and fathers
        in many times
        and many places
        and many cultures –
            all of whom know better than do we
            the ways of truth that heal and of life
                that enlivens.

Be your true word on our lips and receive our utterances back to you.
We thank you for our mother tongue come in the flesh.  Amen.

May God bless you through this prayer today,
Dianne

(Prayer from: Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, Edited by Edwin Searcy, Fortress Press Minneapolis 2003. page 72.)