Upper Room Inclusive Catholic Community Moment of Oneness September 10, 2025 (created by Denise Hackert-Stoner and Mary Theresa Streck, 2020)

 

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81507551772
Meeting ID: 815 0755 1772
To connect by phone dial: +1 646 558 8656

Opening/Centering Song: By the Stream by Christopher Grundy

https://youtu.be/bKL3RvAEc9w?si=A481wWxRYvczzrXM  

 

Opening Prayer: God Dance by Edwina Gateley

Living God,

Let me flow with the waters, fly with the wind and shine with the stars.

Let me round with the moon and stretch with the sky.

And, in my dance, Living God, let me become the waters, the moon, the wind and the stars dancing and leaping  through the universe clear and shining, dancing your name.

Amen.

 

First Reading is by Rachel Carson

Like the sea itself, the shore fascinates us who return to it, the place of our dim ancestral beginnings. In the recurrent rhythms of tides and surf and the varied life of the tide lines there is the obvious attraction of movement and chance and beauty. There is also, I am convinced, a deeper fascination born of inner meaning and significance.

 

When we go down to the low tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change. For us as living creatures it has a special meaning as an area in or near which some entity that could be distinguished as life first drifted in the shallow waters -reproducing, evolving, yielding that endless varied stream of living things that has surged through time and space to occupy the earth.

 

Second Reading is by John O’Donohue

The ocean is one of the delights for the human eye. The seashore is a theater of fluency. When the mind is entangled it is soothing to walk by the seashore, to get the rhythm of the ocean inside you. The ocean disentangles the netted mind. Everything loosens and comes back to itself. The false divisions are relieved, released, and healed.

 

Prayers for Creation:

Holy One,

May we learn to care for creation as a gift from you.

We have polluted our rivers with poisons.

May we learn to care for creation as a gift from you.

 

We have treated our streams as waste dumps.

May we learn to care for creation as a gift from you.

 

We have turned living waters into deathtraps.

May we learn to care for creation as a gift from you.

 

We have wasted precious waters in luxury living.

May we learn to care for creation as a gift from you.

Amen.

 

Closing Prayer: The Prayer of Jesus: An Interpretation

by James Burklo on May 21, 2013 

 

Dear One, closer to us than our own hearts, farther from us than the most distant star, 

you are beyond naming.

May your powerful presence become obvious not only in the undeniable glory of the sky, 

but also in the seemingly base and common processes of the earth.

Give us what we need, day by day, to keep body and soul together, 

because clever as you have made us, we still owe our existence to you.

We recognize that to be reconciled with you, we must live peaceably and justly with other human beings, putting hate and bitterness behind us.

We are torn between our faith in your goodness 

and our awareness of the evil in your creation, so deliver us from the temptation to despair.

Yours alone is the universe and all its majesty and beauty.

So it is, Amen.

 

Closing Song: Water is Life

https://youtu.be/5rkDa7-vQvQ