For the Students of the World

We pray for the students of the world:
Those in refugee camps who are straitened by the vast uncertainties of all their waking moments.
Those in Egypt, Israel, South Africa, Europe, and all the centers of the earth where they live and learn.
Those in our own land who are lonely, homeless, aimless, confused, dedicated.
We pray for the students of the world!

We hold ourselves and them steadily, quietly, with great concentration before Thy altar. Invade their lives, their living contacts, their surroundings, not only with Thy wisdom and understanding but also with Thy judgment and its vitality, to the end that something will become manifest in them that will make Thy kingdom, Thy rule, effective in the way that they take. We do not ask. We do not plead. We do not beg. We offer them and ourselves and we wait. In Thy presence we wait. Thou wilt not reject our spirits.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. page 289
Originally published in The Centering Moment)

My prayer, my humanistic rumblings to a Benevolent Universe, is for those international students who have been abducted by my government, their visas secretly revoked because they exercised their freedom of speech. I pray for their families who have been so disrupted by the anti-American actions of our leaders. I pray for the communities of faith and resistance that now must divert their energies to address this injustice. And I pray for my siblings in the working class to learn from this behavior of those who would rule us that our consciousness may be raised in examining the ways “the system” keeps wanting to keep us down.

I am grateful that Thurman offers us a prayer for all off us, as indeed all of us are learning. All of us are students in this world. We are not estranged from learning by the refugee camps; we are not separated from growing in countries that are at war; we are not limited in our own land by the emotional content of our living. We pray for the students—and we pray for ourselves. For wisdom and understanding; for judgment and its vitality; for the Rule and Realm of the Kin-dom of the people of the divine..