This prayer by Ernesto Barros Cardoso of Brazil is a nice follow-up to yesterday’s post about the need for embodied spirituality and the need to recover the senses, including the gift of touch.
God of Life Prepare our hands for a touch
A new and different touch
Prepare our hands for a touch
A touch of encounter
A touch of awakening
A touch of hope
A touch of feeling
Many are the worn-out gestures
Many are the movements frozen in time
Many are the useless excuses just to repeat attitudes…
Give us daring
To create new titles of community
New links of affection
Breaking away from old ways of relating,
Encouraging true, meaningful ways to move into closeness.
Views from the Edge 
Yes. Oh my, yes. I think our conversation from earlier seeped into this evening. I talked to a lonely person when I went out to fill my bottled water containers an hour ago.
Many handshakes were exchanged. I was given blessings. I am still smiling.
I am so glad you posted this prayer. It is truly beautiful. I love this, especially:
Prepare our hands for a touch
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Sounds like a good evening. And filling water bottles is a physical act – the water has to touch the bottle and the bottle the water. Real space. Real time. We can’t make that up. Or handhsakes or hugs. Nothing is so real as really real, huh!
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Yup! That’s exactly it. And boy howdy, those bottles are heavy. Real handshakes. Face to face conversations. Even the (light) warm weather felt like a hug.
*Laughs* “Nothing is so real as really real” could be a great book title, I think! Or “Nothing So Real As Really Real” maybe?
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May I use those titles? I think you just gave me what I need to proceed with University of Minnesot Press.
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