Prayers for a time of Community Challenges

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause deaths and disrupt billions of lives globally, people may turn to religious groups, family, friends, co-workers or other social networks for support.

How can our faith tradition guide and comfort us through this troubling time? These faith leaders all offer prayers address to the Divine as known and revealed in their own faith commumnity.

A good starting point is to remember that the most repeated phrase in the world’s scriptures is “Do not be afraid!” or “Have no fear!” or “Why Fear when I am Here?”

Please watch our video: We have faith leaders and participants from Christian, Baha’i, Quaker, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Brahma Kumaris, Islam, and commence with a reading of Dadirri, the Indigenous contemplative Deep Listening. We present faith leaders, theologians, Nuns, Interfaith Ministers and the Sikh Parkash.

 

 

Dadirri: Indigenous Contemplative Listening

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr
Senior Australian of the Year 2021
Dadirri recognizes the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’. When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again…A big part of dadirri is listening. My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with nature’s quietness. My people today recognize and experience in this quietness the great Life-Giving Spirit, the Father of us all.

Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait, we do not try to hurry things…..

We wait on God. His time is the right time. We wait for his word to be made clear to us. We don’t worry. We are River people. We cannot hurry the river. We have to move with its current and understand its ways.

We hope that the people of Australia will wait. Not so much waiting for us – to catch up – but waiting with us, as we find our pace in this world.

There is much pain and struggle as we wait. The Holy Father, John Paul II, understood this when he said to us: “If you stay closely united, you are like a tree, standing in the middle of a bushfire sweeping through the timber. The leaves are scorched and the tough bark is scarred and burnt; but inside the tree the sap is still flowing, and under the ground the roots are still strong. Like that tree, you have endured the flames, and you still have the power to be reborn”.

As the Holy Father said, it is time for re-birth. Jesus comes to fulfil, not to destroy. If our culture is alive and strong and respected, it will grow. It will not die.

We know that in time and in the spirit of dadirri – that deep listening and quiet stillness – his way will be clear. We are asking our fellow Australians to take the time to know us; to be still and listen to us. And I believe that the spirit of dadirri that we have to offer will blossom and grow, not just within ourselves, but in our whole nation.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, born in 1950, was baptized in 1965. She became the Northern Territory’s first indigenous teacher. She was for many years principal of St. Francis Xavier School at Daly River.