Prayer For a Time in Need of Empathy

God, teach us to consider also how others experience the world. To understand how my reality and their reality are different and yet they share qualities of the same core desire.

Teach us to listen for shared feelings, for places of connection.

Teach us to be curious and open to hearing differences.

Teach us to love into brokenness
to give space for,
to be patient with,
healing.

Let us be strong in our vulnerability
in our not-knowing,
in exposing our less-than-perfect scary bits, to those in front of us.

Give us courage to face judgment, scorn, and hatred because of the greater good.

Let us be disciples of Essential Goodness, strong in our knowing that in each Being there is a divine light of the soul

Give us the strength, God, to keep feeling empathy, even when we are tired and broken.

For it is then that You are feeling the empathy through us. 
Amen.

    — Tanya Cothran

Tanya Cothran is the Executive Director for Spirit in Action, an international micro-grant nonprofit organization looking for ways to deliver the best possible support to international grassroots organizations and for new ways to tell stories about aid and development. She is co-editor (with Jennifer Lentfer) of Smart Risks: How small grants are helping to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, Practical Action Publishing 2017. Her formative spiritual community is an interdenominational community from where she “learned about the breadth of spiritual paths, and came to see that faith is always a journey and an exploration, rather than a thing to be achieved.”