This sweet greeting on becoming aware was received with absolution in my heart. To all who want to know and understand the strength within you…  

“Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet. / Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast. / Hello.”

“…And I think, in the morning times, I say hello to all those things, and then I try to say hello a little bit to what I know won’t happen. And in that sense, prayer becomes a way within which you cultivate curiosity and the sense of wonder. So that, you know, I’ll be returning back to this and can say hello tomorrow to something that I wouldn’t have even known about today. That’s how I understand prayer in that way. Every now and then, Jesus shows up and says something interesting [laughs] through the Gospel.” – Pádraig Ó Tuama, community leader of Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization.