A Prayer for Protection (Learning to Fear the Right Things)

Prayers for protection are ancient and good in the Christian tradition. And there is a lot in the world that might lead us to seek out protection. But from what? And for what? 

These are not just a philosopher's questions. These are questions that matter for how I will learn to talk to my children. About God. About fear. About the life that is life.

Our answers to these questions reveal our most dearly held priorities and, in turn, shape our prayers for protection. But at least one significant challenge to making reflective space to consider these questions is the sense that there's no time for that. The threats are at hand! Just get the protection in place already. Some days we get up and live lives of largely unreflective reactivity, performing fears so old we don't remember where we learned them.  

But whether we take the time to explore them or not, these questions will linger and share invisible, unnamed space with us. They will haunt us. Haunt us until we turn to them and discover, in the faith, the alternative to reactionary fear that God has revealed in Jesus and opened to the people called 'church.' 

Stephen Colbert recently quoted the poet Robert Hayden in an interview with Dua Lipa, 

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

So I was delighted the other day to stumble on this new-to-me hymn from the 6th century church, which paints the alternative to prayers for reactive protection to unnamed fears by its engagement with the invisible questions - from what? for what? - to sketch understanding of the harms from which we rightly ask God's help to save us. Sharing it with you and, maybe also, with my kids:

Now that the daylight fills the sky,
we lift our hearts to God on high,
that he, in all we do or say,
would keep us free from harm today:

Our hearts and lips may he strain;
keep us from causing others pain,
that we may see and serve his Son,
and grow in love for everyone.

From evil may he guard our eyes,
our ears from empty praise and lies;
from selfishness our hearts release,
that we may serve and know his peace;

that we, when this new day is gone,
night in turn is drawing on,
with conscience free from sin and blame,
may praise and bless his holy name.

To God the Father, heavenly Light,
to Christ, revealed in earthly night,
to God the Holy Ghost we raise
our equal and unceasing praise.

Hymn no. 3 in the Hymnal 1982, Latin, 6th cent.; trans. Neale, Scagnelli, Coffin, and Chandler.