Prayers Plainly Spoken

These prayers were originally prayed in Hauerwa's divinity school classroom—on a variety of occasions including war, births, Yom Kippur and the death of a beloved cat—they not only display an invigorating faith but demonstrate how late-modern Christians can pray with all the passion, turbulence and life of the ancient psalmists.

Gracious God, humble us through the violence of your love so we are able to know and confess our sins.

We want our sins to be interesting, but, God forgive us, they are so ordinary: envy, hatred, meanness, pride, self-centeredness, laziness, boredom, lying, lust, stinginess, and so on.

You saved us from "and so on" to be a royal people able to witness to the world that the power that make us such ordinary sinners have been defeated.

So capture our attention with the beauty of your life that the ugliness of sin may be seen as just that—ugly. God, how wonderful it is to be captivated by you. AMEN