As I prayed with today’s Gospel reading, I kept – for whatever reason, perhaps a prompting of the Holy Spirit– returning to Marie Howe’s poem titled The Star Market. The poem reads:

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.

An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout

breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and

hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:

shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in

with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—

looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car

in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have

been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands

and knees begging for mercy.

 If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,

could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

 Rather than “the feeble and the lame,” the poem could just as easily describe a store bustling with the quick-to-judge, the self-absorbed, the unknowingly and knowingly cruel. The store could be teeming with those anesthetized to neighbors’ needs, close-fisted to the summons of generosity, hard-hearted and compassion averse. As I see it, Marie Howe’s poem could readily depict a store brimming with persecutors of various stripes, the people for whom Jesus demands we pray in today’s Gospel. 

And so, let us pray . . .

Lord, 

When we find it difficult to pray for those we deem prosecutors, 

remind us that we, too, were at the Star Market among this lot of humanity

– witting and unwitting persecutors. 

Keen our awareness to the ways in which we contribute to brokenness and suffering, 

and turn the whole lot of us toward You.

Perfect us, 

that we may ever more fully follow You 

with our whole heart, our whole soul, and our entire will. 

Deepen in us awareness of your summons, 

and free us to embody your compassion, generosity, and mercy through the all of our lives, 

that we may collaborate with You and all of Your beloved creation 

in the coming of Your kin-dom.

Amen.