I was informed, upon joining the university where I spent the last decade of my 40 years in higher education chaplaincy, that the chaplain offered an invocation/meditation at the beginning of each faculty meeting. Knowing faculty meetings and faculty from years of experience, I was daunted by this requirement. Faculty are scientists and poets, artists and professional writers; they are skeptical, critical, and insightful.

At the first meeting, I gave an invocation that was unmemorable; I had not yet found my voice with the community. At the beginning of the second meeting, the minutes were read for approval, whereupon a typo was discovered. The minutes read, “The Chaplain delivered the medication.” Together we enjoyed a big laugh and the minutes were corrected, but I have pondered this in my heart since then.

Understanding Public Prayer

Public prayer in the university setting, as in many other contexts, is treated as a pill to be swallowed before the substance is served. It can seem tacked on to the beginning of a meeting, convocation, commencement, or event as a point of tradition, ritual, or habit. The challenge for the one who writes and delivers this meditation is to offer an experience of wonder, awe, and joy rather than a bitter-tasting obligation that must be endured.

I began writing my own prayers early in my career as chaplain when I realized that those on the receiving end of them might actually be listening and might actually need something from this moment. The extemporaneous prayers of my youth would not suffice for large formal events, and The Book of Common Prayer offered no solace for the unbeliever, the secular, or those who prayed in other forms and languages. It was clear to me that the gathered community deserved a blessing designed for their needs in that space and time. I attempted to understand the purpose of the public prayer, to make it useful for myself and others, and to craft prayers and blessings that spoke to our communal needs.

Over my years of chaplaincy, it was clear that my largely Christian training had not equipped me to adequately serve many other religious or spiritual traditions. My upbringing in the Middle East had given me tools that were useful, though, and I set about to include other spiritual perspectives and to acknowledge them in the ministry to which I was called and in which I delighted. Learning to include those who had not yet been named was a beautiful calling, one to which I believe that all of us are called. We who speak spiritual words of hope over diverse communities need language and imagination to be inclusive.

We might imagine faculties and students as “brains” at work, developing, struggling, and growing in their classrooms. But they are human beings with struggles and challenges, thrills and delights, bodies and souls in the process of teaching and learning. It was my own challenge to learn to name the pain of communities and to enunciate clearly the sources of joy and hope. I had to discover the emotional connective points of each meditative moment, gathering, student, and human who sat beside me. It was necessary to seek my own wholeness, bringing together heart and mind, body and soul for the sake of seeing a way forward.

Seeking Expansive Words for Diverse Communities

My book Blessings for Your Students: Prayers for Interfaith Communities in Higher Education is, then, the work of my lifetime: prayers taken from decades of chaplaincy in higher education and written for audiences without a common belief system or language of transcendence. Over the years, I met largely secular faculties and young adults searching for meaningful ways of articulating their spiritual longings, making meaning in challenge and suffering, and discovering their motivating values within or apart from religion. I experimented with and learned to write prayers and blessings that appealed to these wider impulses that we did seem to share: awe, wonder, gratitude, and a longing for justice and growth.

Now, after retiring from campus chaplaincy, I teach chaplains. I ask them to understand that we connect with those we serve more with our hearts than with our brains, with emotions that sometimes fly in the face of correct theology. Our hearts and minds work together for the sake of those we serve, and we need them both.

In these prayers, I have sought out the heart of the matter and the moment, inviting academic communities to focus on our feelings for one small meditative moment, to be where and who we are, to see and discover our own personal and community wholeness as gifts. And gratitude, which is what all of these blessings come down to, is an apt and proper theological stance for any chaplain, community, or church.

Blessings for Your Students was, then, originally written for students, faculty, and staff. It is a resource for chaplains. More than that, though, it is a resource for us all: for seekers, for leaders, for private devotion, for those wanting new language to open hearts, eyes, and minds, and for those speaking blessing over diverse communities. I hope many will find it accessible and expansive in language and intention.

“We Ask to Be Open” (An Excerpt)

“We begin with a blessing.

“A blessing is an invitation to all that is holy to be with us,
to inhabit and shelter our abundance and need,
a welcome to the Spirit of life to be upon us,
to prepare and honor us,
to make more of what already is,
to fashion something from our less,
a giving over of what we expect,
a welcome of what might be,
and a door into the unimagined.

“A blessing is an opening in us
for hope, direction, meaning.
It is a moment of awareness
that we are not alone
and that we live
at liminal edges of discovery.

“A blessing is a prayer
offering who we are and what we have,
a willingness and intention to be useful and used,
a collection of hearts and minds,
summoning the best of ourselves
for other.

“Blessed be, then.”

From “Open to Every Wonder,” in Blessings for Your Students (97)

Editor’s Note: Please credit the author when sharing or using this blessing.

Blessings for Your Students is available from Church Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever you like to buy or order books independently.

Featured image is by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash