Generations

a prayer on planting dahlia tubers

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I descend from women
who have reached into the soil and found themselves holding Your beating heart,
who have known blossoms to be not ornamental, but existential; 
who have pressed their ears to the earth and heard grace on the verge of emergence.
I am such a woman.

But I also descend from women
who could not locate the taproot of their own pain,
who did not see the beauty in unfamiliar unfurling,
whose relentlessly untilled internality became backbreaking ground, inhospitable to tender shoots. 
Am I such a woman?

From her earliest days, I could smell the soil on my daughter’s skin, 
her ancient soul seeping through her very pores. 
She descends from these same women.
From me. 

Help me to offer and foster the best of what I’ve been given:
to nourish her enchantment with the spirit-sown earth,
to support her receiving and sharing its yielded goodness as worship,
to fuel her own co-creative vocation with the ground.

But I desperately long to offer her something new: 
the chance to find her growing personhood—
in all of its tendrilling particularity—
openheartedly held and beheld,
the soil of my heart softened to surprise by your living water and a perpetual unearthing in Your presence.

God of generations,
I beg you to interrupt a particular kind of inheritance in the relational space between her and I.
I ask that you would mercifully reform me, heal me and integrate me for her sake,
that she might see in my gaze your own life-giving gaze of love,
a gaze of patient attention and unadulterated delight.

Help me to faithfully mediate between her growing rings of memory and the forest that precedes her,
to perceive with her and in her the new things that constantly spring from your indwelling faithfulness,
to honor your goodness as it stretches both into the past and the future.

May we both find ourselves on our knees
for love of worms and dahlias 
and mercy and joy …

For love of You. 

Amen. 

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