I have been reflecting on prayer as more than just a way of nurturing your spiritual life, or a coping strategy, but as our capacity to individually and collectively participate in healing and supporting the Good. I look at prayer as a natural force--a way that we align ourselves with the creative movement of life, a way that enhances the possibilities of furthering life in it's wholeness. Praying for the healing of the Pandemic and all of it's social and personal consequences can seem overwhelming--certainly too great a task for whatever you personally can manage in whatever state you find yourself. But like most complex problems that seem a tangled mess, we start with what is closest, right in front of us and begin there and let our hearts lead.
Essayist Annie Dillard in "Holy the Firm" (1977) wrote: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been."
For further inspiration, I include America's 2019 Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem". Follow the link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46545/eagle-poem