Ruah Bull - Spiritual Director

 We give thanks for another day on this earth. We give thanks for this day to enjoy the compassionate goodness  of You, our Creator. We acknowledge with one mind our respect and gratefulness to all the sacred circles of life. Bind us together in the circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and one another.

 I believe in one God, one human family, one planetary community, one body, one love, uniting all beauty, for God's infinite love is infinite, fecund and beautiful. I believe I am entangled with all earth life and all living creatures. I believe this future is the relational unity of all things in God, I believe this earth has a future entangled with God, I believe the heart of God is love.

 Our mother who art underfoot, hallowed be thy names,  thy seasons come, thy will be done, within us as around us. Thank you for our daily bread, our water, our air, and our lives and so much beauty; lead us not into selfish craving and the destructions that are the hunger of the glutted, but deliver us from wanton consumption of thy vast but finite bounty, for thine is the only sphere of life we know, and the power and glory, forever and ever, amen.

 I solemnly vow that I will faithfully execute my role in healing, inspiring and empowering the people of our nation and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend dignity, justice and equity for all people and the planet. I take this oath and servant calling faithfully as an act of Revolutionary Love. (Painting by Arthur Poulin)

I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, to clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don't cut that one. I don't cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be.

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence. Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe to the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "the least of these my brethren." Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.