Memorial Day 2012 Prayer

Courageous Love we join together in remembrance today, in honor of all those who have died defending their country, in honor all those who have sought to serve freedom and human rights and dignity and sacrificed and died in that service. Courageous Love, let us not forget them, but remember our friends, our family, and our neighbors. Let none who have so sacrificed be a stranger to us. Strengthen us to carry on their stories, to care for their friends, their families, and their neighbors as our own, to give the help they would have given, to mentor the children they would have mentored, to love boldly and truly in their memory. Bring comfort to the families and friends who mourn, waking in the night aware only of their losses, yearning for what can no longer be. Bring comfort to the friends and family who wonder why, who struggle with loneliness, who need others to hold fiercely to the memory of those who are lost. Let us learn the lesson of the great cost of war and from that learn how to be better neighbors to one another, how to love past our differences, how to bring a free peace and the chance for a life of dignity in tribute to and in memory of those who died doing the same. Courageous Love, sometimes we have awful sacrifices to endure; grant us the courage today to help one another endure and find our way in memory to a creating a more loving, a more merciful, and more just world. Amen.