Prayer 36
Worship
Prayers for the Age of Technology
Object:
Dear Master Communicator:
Through the many wonderful ways in which you have maintained communication with us, our lives have been filled with assurance and joy. You have spoken through many sensitive souls in every generation, especially through Jesus, who was the Word made flesh and dwelt among us. We have ever felt the presence of your Spirit with us offering guidance and comfort. We have rejoiced in the privilege of interaction with you through prayer.
Your messages have come to us also through the many voices of nature, the rhythms of the heavens, and the orderliness observed by science.
Thank you for your comforting presence and for endowing us with the sensibilities that make it possible for us to hear and respond to you. Our desire is to hear you more clearly and respond to you with greater understanding.
Thank you, too, for making us social beings with the ability and need to communicate with one another and experience the joy of love. Thus you have redeemed us from dreadful loneliness and provided us the means for limitless enrichment and happiness.
We cannot thank you enough for the marvelous means of communication with which, by your grace, our creative efforts have been rewarded: the development of language; the art of writing; radio; television; satellite relays; cybernetics; the internet; and proliferating other electronic means.
Recent development of massive, instant, worldwide means of communication has revolutionized the patterns of our lives. We are excited over the benefits being realized, and the potentials anticipated.
But, dear God, you can see better than we that all is not well in the uses being made of these media. Give us the wisdom and will to control their use for the common good. Help us avoid their prostitution to manipulative and exploitative ends.
And keep us alert to the danger represented in our great reliance on the machine in this arena of our experience. Guide us around the increasingly monstrous threat of letting machines so stand between us in our communication that they beguile us into the barrenness and numbness of machine-like interaction with one another.
In full awareness of our reliance on your guiding providence, Amen.
Through the many wonderful ways in which you have maintained communication with us, our lives have been filled with assurance and joy. You have spoken through many sensitive souls in every generation, especially through Jesus, who was the Word made flesh and dwelt among us. We have ever felt the presence of your Spirit with us offering guidance and comfort. We have rejoiced in the privilege of interaction with you through prayer.
Your messages have come to us also through the many voices of nature, the rhythms of the heavens, and the orderliness observed by science.
Thank you for your comforting presence and for endowing us with the sensibilities that make it possible for us to hear and respond to you. Our desire is to hear you more clearly and respond to you with greater understanding.
Thank you, too, for making us social beings with the ability and need to communicate with one another and experience the joy of love. Thus you have redeemed us from dreadful loneliness and provided us the means for limitless enrichment and happiness.
We cannot thank you enough for the marvelous means of communication with which, by your grace, our creative efforts have been rewarded: the development of language; the art of writing; radio; television; satellite relays; cybernetics; the internet; and proliferating other electronic means.
Recent development of massive, instant, worldwide means of communication has revolutionized the patterns of our lives. We are excited over the benefits being realized, and the potentials anticipated.
But, dear God, you can see better than we that all is not well in the uses being made of these media. Give us the wisdom and will to control their use for the common good. Help us avoid their prostitution to manipulative and exploitative ends.
And keep us alert to the danger represented in our great reliance on the machine in this arena of our experience. Guide us around the increasingly monstrous threat of letting machines so stand between us in our communication that they beguile us into the barrenness and numbness of machine-like interaction with one another.
In full awareness of our reliance on your guiding providence, Amen.
