All Souls Prayer ~ Lisa Doege
These were our beloved. These whose names we’ve spoken aloud or in our hearts are our beloved still. And our hearts swell with gratitude that it is so.
We’re grateful for days, weeks, months or years, whether long or too short.
Grateful for enduring memories and forgotten moments.
Grateful for lives and stories entwined.
Grateful for lessons and laughter, work and play, activity and stillnesses shared.
Our gratitude for having been known and loved in our wholeness by these kin who shaped our beings, and are now gone, that gratitude calls us into life.
In their memory, their honor, we breathe in peace and resolution, and breathe out regret and rumination. Breath in serenity, breathe, out disquiet. Breathe in courage, breathe out fear. That we might not cease living before we cease drawing breath. For this call into life more fully lived is the blessing born of having loved souls now departed. Amen.
