Sunday Prayer

In light of Friday's tragedy I was considering a prayer that was sentimental to help share in the grief. But instead I found this remark from Henri Nouwen, from Reaching Out. Let us remember that our personal spirituality is empty and incomplete until we consider ourselves as part of the larger community, because at the heart of any spiritual life lies Compassion - the ability to grieve with.

It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it.... [I]f the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion.