Websites with Prayers and Reflections for Children
Please visit the following websites to view prayers/reflections for children:
www.bcca.org/bahaivision/prayers/7.html - Bahá'í Prayers for children and youth
www.globalgang.org.uk/reallife/faithfile/prayers2.html - Christian AID
www.emmanuellutheran.org/ministries/prayer-children.html - Emmanuel Lutheran Church
www.stmonica.ecsd.net/prayers_for_children.htm - St. Monica
www.catholic.org/clife/prayers/prayers.php?section_id=63&name=Sick - Catholic
www.childrensdefense.org/religiousaction/childrenssabbaths/default.aspx - Children's Defense Fund
Sermons and Reflections
 For the Children of the World
Reflection in a Capsule
God Speaks in the Voice of Children
Jesus Launched The First Child Rights Campaign
Prayer from a Young Child
For the Children of the World
A sermon by Reverend Richard Pierce
United Riverside Congregational Church
Lawrence, MA
"No child should go to bed hungry."
One thing that Jesus really did not like was "lukewarmness." The world is all before us, beautiful and bleeding, and yet we don't have the energy and passion to get off our duffs and get involved. Oh I know, we are all so routinely busy; and then we have so many distractions. Take my sons; (as they used to say in vaudeville, take my sons, please!) Just turning the music down keeps me busy all the time; and they "drive" me to distraction! Well, you get the idea.
But it is a big problem for our time. Too many ordinary decent good people let busy-ness and distractions fill up their day-to-day lives. In his poem, The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats said it so well: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
And there is a clear and present need for our passionate involvement, so certain and so desperate, as to get us off the couch and to the phone, to the desk to write, to the closet to get a jacket and get out into the street. Is there pain and suffering, danger and death, threatening what Jesus tells us to especially cherish and care for? Kids, that's what - in clear and present danger - yes, little children.
Jesus said: "Let the children come unto you ..." Jesus said: "You must be as little children." Jesus said: "If you harm the least of these ..." Jesus said: "Whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water..." Jesus said: "Whoever receives one such child in my name..." Say it with me - you all know it - "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world."
Did Sister Margaret or Elder Jimmy Joslyn or Aunt Mary Moody or whoever taught you good and evil remind you that you can sin by omission? That failing to help or do the right thing when called can be as bad as doing harm, doing evil, doing wrong?
We are being called - and we are failing. God forgive us, we are failing. Children are suffering and dying; and we are letting it happen, God help us.
I teach a course at the Middlesex Community College called Death and Dying. And I tell my students that a great part of all the human beings who ever lived never made it out of childhood. Even as of 1900 in America, more than half the deaths every year were childhood deaths. And then I say: But since then, thanks to immunizations, good nutrition, pre-natal care, etc., we have cut that childhood death rate down close to nothing. And we as adults now live at least 30 years longer, on average, than 100 years ago.
True. Wonderful. Something to celebrate... Alas, our celebrating must be brief, conditional, local. Alas it is still, God help us, too early to celebrate. No, no. For the "we" here is us, America; it may include the most advanced nations on the planet. But for the rest of the world, most of humanity, millions of children face the same old world of disease and death.
A Los Angeles Times report dated Aug. 7, 2005: "Along the southern edge of the Sahara desert, malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and other ills kill one in four children before the age of five." I can assure you that parents in Africa love their children just as much as we do - it's an unfathomable loss.
I am not going to say shame on us, shame on us Americans, for I do not believe that. I believe the deep problem is not lack of heart, but lack of seeing - and hearing. Americans, overall, can be such a generous people - they see a tragedy somewhere: a child falls into a well in Texas, a tsunami rolls in, and we are moved and we move. Historian Richard Goodwin says that when America saw older black ladies attacked by police dogs on TV, he knew there would be a civil rights bill. Vietnam came into our living rooms and we were horrified.
And yet we do not see the sufferings of little ones, the terrifying sufferings of children, our children. Why do we not hear the world crying? As a poet said, it is all a matter of seeing... (and hearing) . . .
There are, I think, several reasons we do not see the children, hear their cries: disturbingly, despite the Concorde and the Airbus, the Internet and economic interdependence, CNN and all, the wider world remains an alien place to most Americans. And our competitive society has prepared us to expect that some people will be losers, some people will be poor. As the English novelist George Eliot eloquently pointed out, writing about Dorothea in her novel Middlemarch, we humans are not so constituted as to notice things that are in front of us all the time. The sudden catastrophe of a tsunami is different; the daily grinding down of the world's poor is background noise, we don't even hear it.
Then too, sensationalism rules the media: if a child is murdered anywhere in America by its parents, I hear it right away on the radio. If a child dies for lack of good pre-natal care, or just clean water, who notices? Yet from our perspective, that should be much more sensationally evil - for we cannot save children from insane parents, but we could save that other, those others...
Statistics can be frightening, but after a while, numbing. It was not how many people died on 9/11, but the father on the street, desperately seeking his child, that broke your heart.
"UNICEF reported that ... young people in developing nations live in severe deprivation with little access to basic human needs, such as food, water and sanitation."
"Doctors Without Borders is admitting nearly 1,300 children to its emergency feeding program in the Maradi region. The numbers are still rising."
"According to UNICEF, 192,000 malnourished children need help, 32,000 of whom are facing death."
But consider this from Rebecca Mandell, in The Boston Globe of July 31, 2005: "As someone who lived in Maradi, Niger, as a Peace Corps volunteer, it has pained me to see both the U.S. government and the media ignore the children starving to death there. They desperately need our help, and if we have any sense of morality and compassion, we will help them."
If you want to know who my heroes are, besides nurses and grammar school teachers, and, of course, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and Dr. Martin Luther King and Sister Maria Teresa, I'd tell you it's those nurses and doctors and volunteers bringing immunizations, nutrition, clean water, anti-diarrhea meds, etc., to little ones far away. Yes there are pictures, and you do not have to dig far for them - just pick up a picture book of Princess Diana or Audrey Hepburn - talk of heroes! - and see those huge eyes and huge bellies on the tiniest of God's loved ones.
But we do not have to volunteer for Doctors without Borders or Oxfam to help. There is plenty we can do-right here, in our own communities
First, it seems, we have to establish that these are our kids, our responsibility; then, when we see them in pain, in disease, in death agonies, then, perhaps, we will move. And they are not aliens, others, "them," foreigners; they are us. After all, it was St. Paul who argued that our Christian vision was not just to remain in a Jewish context, but to reach out to all of humanity. It was Jesus' consistent demand that our love not be for "us," our family, our children, our ... but that it is how we treat the others, not my mother and my brothers, but a man who had fallen among thieves, the poor, the hungry and thirsty - that defines us. How often in our churches do we sing, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world."
Maybe then our initial responsibility to the children, their first need from us, is that we make some noise, show some pictures, raise some awareness; as Goodwin pointed out, it was the thrusting into America's faces, by TV, of racist violence, that moved the nation - and the Congress; it was Walter Cronkite, and the media, that showed us Vietnam so that we could not avoid seeing it.
Have you noticed?? How often "What can I do" is the end of a discussion when it should be the beginning? To begin, as Elie Wiesel might suggest, we could shed a few tears, do a little grieving, that children are suffering. Then we could complain! We're all good at this! Complain, complain, to our family and friends, to the government, to God! Something must be done! I think of what anthropologist Margaret Mead so famously said, "Never underestimate the ability of a few individuals to change the world. Indeed, that's the only thing that ever has."
All it takes from us is some time and energy - spread the word, incite some passion, move some people to tears. Get people to see and hear, to feel and grieve. Go to the window and shout out: There are children in pain, and we can help! It never takes much of our money - if we all gave a few bucks, we could change the world.
On Nov. 1, 2 and 3, the PBS network will air a remarkable six-hour series entitled Rx for Survival. They're encouraging people to learn more and do more about global health, specifically to let your legislators know what you think, and possibly to donate to a fund called "Rx for Child Survival," which aims to give some very poor children a fighting chance to stay alive. And to save a child is to help a family and to build a future. I encourage you to watch the show and check it out at pbs.org/Rxforsurvival and see if it's for you. There will be a Rolling Month of Prayer during October, leading up to the broadcast, as well as activities promoting child survival, organized by many PBS stations around the country. A great way to get involved.
In one of the most famous and wonderful of all Japanese poems, The Year of My Life, the poet Kobayashi Issa mourns the loss of his little son. Besides the grief of a father for his lost child, the poem is a comment on how little the religious hope for another life can assuage the loss of a child in this life. Whatever may come later and elsewhere, a bright light goes out in the world when a child dies.
As religious people, we are not allowed simply to feel an easy pity for the poet, for a father bereft, for that unnatural occurrence, a child preceding parents into death. We are asked beyond that to reach compassion - a word meaning we feel with, suffer with, the sorrowing parent - and beyond that (!) - like the bodhisattva of Buddhist tradition, we cannot settle into our own comfort, accept our own blessings, enjoy our own children with peace of mind, if there are others suffering, if another's child is ill or in pain or dying. As Rebbe Saunders suggests, in Chaim Potok's wonderful novel The Chosen, it will be hard to rest easy if we hear the world's children crying.
It was Jesus who valued the innocence, the capacity for wonder, the quick laughter and tears - and perhaps the consciousness of dependency on us - of children, so that he declared that those would be found to be the qualities of the inhabitants of heaven. Yet it is those same beautiful innocents - who have in no way forged their own fates - who are dying on our hands - or rather, without our hands.
I must come to an end. I am reminded of that line from the great play of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Vladimir says, "Was I sleeping while the others suffered?" Are we sleeping now?
A child's cry in the night is a sure wakeup for a parent. Let us hear the children of the world crying and respond, as if it is our own child's voice we hear. For it is within our power to help.
Our Christianity, our participation in the religious life, our sheer humanity, demand this of us. And as Christians, we have our own special mandate, appropriately sung over and over in our Christian churches:
Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.
Reflection in a Capsule
A sermon by Iyalosa/Priestess Omolewa Eniolorunopa
Sacred African Literary Society/Egbe Odu Ifa, Atlanta, GA
The children in our global community obviously need medicine, clean air, food, water, education, clothing, protection during wartimes and natural disasters. Yet, if all children and youth are to thrive, they require a strong sense of identity and spirituality.
There is a West African adage which states: The best religion for a person is the religion of 'their' ancestors. Statistics show there are over 4,200 major world religions on the planet and practically all are found in most international cities.* Often, when we call on Faith-Based Organizations (FBO's), only three religions are recognized. All the children of the world need to feel their culture and religions are valid (as good as others...not better), promoting religious tolerance, respect, and good health.
As part of our Rx package for good health, let us be all inclusive - welcoming all faiths.Let us recognize the contributions of all religions/FBO's - without consideration to political or financial clout. Only through our human, spiritual connectedness can we rejoice in our similarities and grow to respect our differences. Only when we welcome diversity will we be able to embrace our global neighbors and truly heal ... increasing the chances of survival for our youth and children ... internationally.
Prescription:
- Take a large dose of religious diversity
- Talk to your interfaith friends regularly
- Call me in the morning!!!
* Adherents.com -- National & World Religion Statistics
God Speaks in the Voice of Children
Donald E. Messer 1
People commune with the divine in many ways. Not everyone hears the voice of God in the same way. Some seem to find direct inspiration from reading Holy Scriptures, others by deep prayer and meditation, while some find the divinity in holy sacraments and worship. Many hear God speaking to them as they listen to a sermon or a piece of music or while facing a crisis moment in their lives. More often than not, my experience, however, parallels the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey who once wrote, "God may be a shout in the street."
Like A Shout In the Street
I have often heard the voice of God speaking to me "like a shout in the street" when I have encountered children suffering with HIV/AIDS, enduring hunger and malnutrition, and roaming the streets in search of survival. This God speaks to me of injustice in a world of plenty that deprives its youngest and most vulnerable of its most basic human rights for safety, food, health, respect, education and care. This God calls me to be a voice for the voiceless and to work towards a new world where every child not only survives but also thrives.
The moral scandal of the 21st century is the fact that children today are starving in Niger, Sudan and other places on earth. Some 400 million children in this world face food insecurity; yet there is an abundance of food available if there was political will to share the food and make the necessary changes in societal structures. Senators George McGovern, Bob Dole and I have written a new book called Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) that outlines a strategy for feeding the children of the world.
Likewise, it is ethically immoral that the world is not rushing available medicine around the world to needy children and pregnant mothers about to give birth. For a very low cost, HIV/AIDS can be prevented; no child should become infected. Likewise the imperative of sharing antiretroviral medicine to HIV positive parents must be underscored - for how much better it is to keep the parents alive than to cast children into orphanages. We must break the conspiracy of silence and the complacency of sloth and get involved in addressing the issue of children and AIDS in the world. (Donald E. Messer, Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis, Fortress Press, 2004)
God speaks a word of judgment to the world and to its leaders. From the days of John the Baptist to the Dalai Lama, the message of religious leaders has been to "share" what we have that there might be life abundant for all. But too often we have failed.
Hands That Help Us Touch Heaven
The nineteenth century preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher once observed, "Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven." Donald H. Dunson has written poetically about how the God of love embraces young ones:
"If you want to draw close to the creative presence of God, simply wrap your arms around the body of a small child yearning to grow. The Redeemer's heart burns with desire in the bodies of doctors and researchers struggling for a new world set free from malaria, hunger, AIDS, measles, polio tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, and all the preventable infectious diseases that harm and kill life at its beginning. The Holy Spirit is the comforter and companion of all those children who walk the earth alone and who just yearn to be touched with the hand of love."
(No Room at the Table: Earth's Most Vulnerable Children, p. 10)
|
Individuals and institutions, cultures and churches will find their salvation and new life when they reach out in compassion without boundaries to the world's most vulnerable children.
A gifted musician, John Blinn, has composed a beautiful song called, "God Sees the World with Eyes of a Child." Among the verses is this poignant thought:
"Simple faith rejoices in the wisdom of God's way,
With the faith of children we welcome a new day.
God saves the world with the life of a child.
God saves the world with the life of a child."
|
At the heart of Christian theology and tradition is the belief that God saved the world with the life of a child. The celebration of Christmas each year is a vivid reminder of our simple belief that God's inclusive love for all humanity was manifested in the birth of a little baby named Jesus. However, we write our theories or doctrines of the Incarnation, we fundamentally know that the spark of the divine is in every child, and when children are destroyed or damaged, we are injuring the very image of God on earth.
Be The Heart and Hands Of God
In a soon-to-be-published book, Ana's Voice: When God Speaks through a Silent Child, Randy Jessen challenges us to hear what both children and God are saying even when there appears to be no sound. Instead of accepting the status quo of children abandoned in orphanages in Romania, he and his wife broke through bureaucratic barriers and adopted Ana, a little five-year-old orphan girl with HIV/AIDS. When he first discovered her in a warehouse of children, he realized she was a survivor. Jessen writes that she had:
". . . learned the fine art of shutting down. There is no sense in crying if no one answers. There is no incentive to interact if there is no one to smile back at you. There is no reason to rely on anyone outside your own personal environment. She has learned to shut down. She has learned to survive."
|
Now at the age of 17, Ana no longer survives, but thrives as a beautiful young woman, already making her positive contribution to the world. The Jessen's heard the voice of God in a child who could not speak. She was saying, "Come and get me. Don't leave me. Be the hands and heart of God before it is too late."
This is the message of God that millions and millions of children are communicating to us, if we would only listen. We are being summoned to marshal personal and institutional and government resources to end hunger, combat disease, promote education, and ensure human rights, dignity, and opportunity for every child on this planet. Truly the silent cry of every malnourished and abandoned child is "Come and get me. Don't leave me. Be the hands and heart of God before it is too late."
Let us pray that each of us will hear and respond to God's call . . . before it is too late for us as well.
1 Donald E. Messer, President Emeritus & Henry White Warren Professor of Practical Theology, at the Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado, also heads the Center for the Church and Global AIDS (dmesser@iliff.edu). He is author of Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches & the Global AIDS Crisis (Fortress, 2004) and Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith (Fortress, 2005) with former Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole.
Jesus Launched The First Child Rights Campaign
A sermon by Reverend Evatt Mugarura
The Balm In Gilead
In the book of Psalms 127:3 Children are presented as a gift from God to human kind. How have we as parents, guardians and the community guarded these gifts from God from getting spoiled? We have a responsibility to care for these gifts to maintain their beauty and value.
In the gospel according to Mathew 9:13-15, Jesus Christ vividly demonstrated the importance of children by embracing them in the face of scoldings by his disciples. How is our attitude today in dealing with children in homes, schools or important gatherings any different? Do leaders and the rest of adults think of children first or they are always the last to be served? I cry for the suffering of these little ones of God. I am constantly questioning how much is being done to identify HIV-infected children and to ensure that those who need treatment will access ARVs at the same pace with their infected parents. Jesus would have embraced these infected children as a gift to us from God and made sure that they were treated.
Then Jesus took a child and made him stand before the crowd. He put his hands around the child and said, "Whoever welcomes in my name one of these children welcomes me..." He compares children with the Kingdom of God because of their innocence (Mark 9:36). As caretakers of these little ones, we are obliged to protect and guide the children instead of misleading and misguiding them. Neglect of this obligation is no different from causing them to sin. If there is anybody to repent for letting children down it is we, the parents, guardians, neighboring adults, teachers including priests and not the children we have caused to sin or sinned against. Some parents are not ashamed of molesting their own daughters; some teachers and priests who are supposed to guide these little ones have instead misled them by sexually exploiting them. The punishment of anyone who causes children to sin or violates their rights must be heavy.
All children are blessed and consecrated by God to be useful members of the community (Jeremiah 1:4). Proverbs 22:6 instructs us to train every child in the right way so that he or she is nurtured into a responsible person when he or she grows up. Training may be through Sunday school, bible classes, after school programs but the most important form of training is the education the child gets through daily interaction with adults.
Children will learn everything they see their parents, guardians, teachers and other adults do. The behaviors of our young people today reflect our own behaviors in families, schools and communities at large. There is need to examine how much we are influencing our children to adopt positive behaviors before we blame them for failing to meet our unrealistic expectations.
Today, many children world-wide spend more time with teachers than with their parents or guardians. What do the teachers do with our children to model them into responsible citizens? Most heartbreaking is the tendency for parents to push their children to school with high expectation that the teacher will help shape the behavior of the child. The teacher too pushes the child to the parent with the same assumption so that in the long run, the child is left hanging with nobody to nurture him or her. These children may end up dropping out of school, joining drug and substance abuse gangs, committing crime. In this case, who takes the blame; the child, the parent or teacher? It is little wonder that they have no where to run for guidance? It is little wonder that our children may be more confused about how to live their lives because they can not tell who will protect their rights and who will not. How can we create a conducive environment for our children to live freely and not be enslaved by their own society?
Ensuring children's rights and survival must be a collective responsibility by parents/guardians, teachers, communities and government. These key stakeholders must collaborate in formulating appropriate policies and realistic follow up mechanisms that should challenge the rights of freedom without responsibility.
The church and other religious institutions should re-examine their approach in dealing with children in their places of worship to allow them to reclaim their rightful position in society that is unfortunately fading away due to injustices within.
In all we do with or for children, let's remind ourselves daily that children are a gift from God.
Prayer from a Young Child
A reflection by Fr. Joseph F. Girzone
Author of The Inspirational National Bestseller Joshua - A Parable For Today
Dear Jesus, I think of you a lot. I know you love me, and are with me always. I have so many things to share with you. When I was really small, I was always happy. My life was like a sunny day. There was always sunshine. But, now that I am getting older, I have sad days too. I don't like these sad days - they frighten me. It is like a stormy day, with thunder and lightening. I wish I could hide. But, I can't hide from the things that hurt me. They are too much a part of my life. My mother and father are good people, but they fight a lot, and that makes me feel very upset inside. I don't even feel like eating. Every time they fight I think they are going to get a divorce and I can't sleep worrying about it. I hope they learn to like each other better and learn to get along. And I hope they never get divorced. It's like the world would come to an end, my little world where I was always so happy.
Jesus, I have some friends who are very unhappy. Please make them happy, and help them to know that you love them.
Sometime, Jesus, I do things that are not nice. I am sorry afterwards. I know you love me even when I do bad things. I am sorry, Jesus. Please help me to do better, and to tell those I hurt that I am sorry. That is hard, Jesus, to say that I am sorry, but help me to do it anyway.
I know you made me to do something special in my life. Please help me to stay close to you, and be you best friend so we can work together. It will be a lot of fun if I could be your partner. I love you, Jesus. Please keep me close to you, and bless all my friends, and even those who are not my friends and who are not nice to me. I love you, Jesus.
|
