A prayer for frugal life

Holy One,
Our world is overtaken by our greed for more goods than we need.
We confess our rapacious consumption, obsession with winning,
and our undercutting and isolating of the most vulnerable among us.

Renewing Spirit,
Help your church to be open, in fidelity to the gospel of Jesus,
to all possibilities in the coming of the new kinship – the kin-dom of God – on earth.
Help us to align our ways to sharing, social cohesion,
and symbiotic co-living between humans and the rest of creation;
to see creation as a cosmic web of living beings,
in which all creatures live in mutual interdependence.
Help your church to abide in a harmonious bond between the Source of being and all things.

Loving God,
Help us to see you as the God-in-relation.
Open our eyes to the ministry of Jesus, a ministry of care and compassion:
To grieve with the poor earth our greed has devoured,
To be still, not distracted by a thousand useless things,
To see that earth, sea, sky and every creature in it have a spiritual capacity to bring us back to you and the harmony of the cosmic dance.

Living God,
Help us to live in a dynamic becoming,
opening ourselves to this network of relationships and the future.
Help us to see that we cannot live without receiving the gifts of others,
and also sharing our gifts with them.
As the Thai Buddhist activist Sulak Sivaraksa taught:
“I am, therefore you are; you are, therefore I am: we inter-are.”
Help us to say “Yes” to your invitation,
to accept our “among-ness” with the uncoerced exuberance of overflowing friendship:
with you, with our own spirit, with our neighbours, and with the rest of creation.
May it be so.

—Nindyo Sasongko is a founder of “Theovlogy”. An ordained minister in the Gereja Kristen Muria Indonesia (GKMI) Conference in Indonesia, he is currently a PhD student in systematic theology and a teaching fellow at Fordham University, New York, USA. He is also theologian in residence at Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship, New York City, and a member of the MWC Creation Task Force.

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