This prayer was inspired by an original “Prayer for Goodness*” written by the Rev. Laura Cavicchio of Reading, Massachusetts, a dear friend I met when on Internship in the UU Church of Reading.
Because this prayer was created for a grieving community at McMaster University that included many Iranian Canadians, I tried to reference the duality of God inherent in the ancient Persian (Iranian) Zoroastrian understanding of the divine.
Zoroastrianism is one of the few religions that actually has a concept of God that allows for dark and light. For that reason I felt it could be particularly helpful at a time when people were grappling with the possibility that the incident that resulted in the death of their loved ones was intentional.
It was written after the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in January of 2020 following the assassination of Qasem Soleimani by the U.S. under Donald Trump.
The plane, full of promising young people, many of them Canadian, was intentionally (if mistakenly) shot down 4 hours after Iran began missile strikes in retaliation for Soleimani’s murder.
As the saying goes, “When elephants fight, it is the ground that suffers.”
Nova Scotia artist Bruce MacKinnon’s powerful cartoon says it better than words ever could.
While this was written for a specific circumstance, it really addresses the grief inherent in sudden, tragic and violent death, as well as the inability to “Say Goodbye.”
Loss in these kinds of situations is especially poignant.
Prayer for Healing after Tragedy
We come together as one heart beating, one voice crying, one soul grieving
We are part of many communities; Iranian Canadians, McMaster students, family and friends, colleagues, graduate students, engineers, faculty, staff and alumni, Canadians and world citizens alike, stunned by the sudden and tragic loss of so many people with lives full of promise and possibility.
Today we remember three people with close connections to our McMaster community, PhD engineering students Iman Aghabali and Mehdi Eshaghian and post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Health Sciences Maghsoudlou Estarabadim.
May their names be written on the Tree of Life.
From Iran’s ancient wisdom and learning we know of a God that is with us in every moment of our lives; a God of compassion present in both light and dark, in terror and in comfort, in grief as well as love, in acts of kindness as well as moments of despair.
We have felt this ancient spirit anew in the support offered to one another, in the shared tear and heart-felt embrace and in this community coming together to mourn, to grieve and to give thanks for what was given, even as so much has been lost.
We come with more questions than answers and in our grief we ask – Where is goodness? Where is hope? Where is healing?*
There is goodness in the lives we gather to remember; intelligence, friendship, humour, warmth and kindness.
These qualities of those we remember did not die with them; they live as long as we remember and celebrate what came to life in them. They live as long as we pledge to continue their work in their spirit.
There is hope in taking up where they left off. Engineers are builders and those in the Faculty of Health Sciences are healers. All is not lost if we make a sacred promise to use the gifts that they would have used to build up this world and to heal its divisions. We take up their calling to honour what might have been had they lived.
There is healing in every gesture of support, every word of love, honour or friendship we can say to assuage someone else’s sorrow. Where there is great pain, there is great possibility – to reconstitute a shattered world one kindness at a time and fill the ocean of grief one drop at a time.
Everything matters at a time like this; You are not helpless but essential.
Let us, in the spirit of the Love that is eternal, ensure that the ripples of love moving outward from this time match and in time, overtake the ripples of loss; that when grief slowly gives way to memory and even celebration, we know we will have done all we could to help, to hold, to believe, to honour, to give thanks and to love with all our wounded hearts.
Amen.