Wednesday, November 4, 2020

A Prayer for the Day after an Election Day that Declares No Winner Yet

And so we awake on the morning after election day to find out that no winner has yet been declared.  I should clarify--no official winner, decided officially.  Trump has declared himself a winner, as he said he would do.  But the counting continues, and I have no idea who is likely to be a winner at the end.  Right now, it feels like we're all losers on the cusp of losing something even more essential--like gamblers who have lost more than they could afford to who then decide to make one last huge gamble, to bet all the remaining money one last time.

But let me pull back from my catastrophic thinking.  Let me take the long view as I compose a prayer for the morning after election day.  Let me think about the cosmos in an attempt to calm myself.  Here's a sketch I made:


I'm in a Grunewald Guild online journaling group; we're reading our way through Barbara A. Holmes' Race and the Cosmos.  The above sketch is a response to the book, not to the election, a sketch I made while thinking about what the sacrament of communion would look like, if informed by quantum mysteries.

This morning, I'm using this sketch to remind myself that while we live in perilous times, it's not like humans haven't lived in perilous times before.  For now, there's nothing to do until we know the outcome of this presidential race, and we may not know the outcome for days.

I say there's nothing to do, but let me compose a prayer, a prayer I didn't anticipate needing.

Creator God, we come to you on a day of uncertainties, a day with ballots still to be counted, a day of waiting, a day of difficult emotions.  Be with us as we practice patience.  Be with those who don't have skills in practicing patience.  Remind us of all the many larger pictures that we often don't see as we get mired in our daily lives.  Remind us of the peace that can be ours.  We pray to find a way to bind the wounds and create a world that is closer to the one that you intend for us.

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