This Tuesday night a group of Bama Wesley students gathered in the prayer chapel at The Wesley Foundation and prayed for our campus community; all those who will come together today and throughout this academic year to become The University of Alabama.
Our prayers are expressions of our hearts’ deepest, most intimate yearnings.
As we gathered for prayer on the eve of a new semester’s beginning, our hearts yearned for connection, for comfort, for purposeful growth, for a wholistic community of loving mutual support and acceptance. This yearning was not only for this sort of community and peace for those in the room, or even the Bama Wesley faith community. This yearning was bigger than that. More expansive. Much further reaching.
Today we will begin a new semester on campus at UA, but what happens in this place, in this season, will not stay here. It will not simply become a memory which is filed away to recall from time to time as we go through our lives. What happens in this place, in this season, will echo and ripple throughout creation through the loving communities and lives of loving kindness developed during this season and those to come.
As we gathered in the chapel last night to pray for new beginnings we honored the foundation of our community of faith; the yearning of the hearts who gathered together on the eve of a new academic year decades ago and prayed for their campus community, the yearnings which fostered the loving community of faith we have inherited.
We prayed a litany that was shared by our faith community in 1982 (and perhaps more times before and since). We echoed the yearning of our community’s heart. And we found we still yearn for the same things; guidance, peace, comfort, openness to what is new, acceptance, and the willingness to become aware of Christ dwelling within our neighbors and ourselves.
As you walk into whatever new beginnings await for you today, we want you to know we are walking alongside you. You are not alone. You are more than enough. You are loved.
– Zac H
And now we offer this prayer, A Litany For Beginning An Academic Year, for our campus community,
