Eleanor Roosevelt's Prayer

Finally, I am once again connected to the internet. Our cable internet service had been out since Tuesday evening. I've been working on my laptop with a slow wireless connection since then. I am way behind in answering email, and, by accident, I deleted a group of emails that I wanted to read and/or save. If I have not responded to an email about an important matter, you may have to contact me again.

The young man who came to reconnect our internet service was efficient and pleasant. As I've said before, it's generally not the employees of Charter who disappoint me. It's the executives who decide policy for the company who are the problem.

I think of the posts which I've wanted to do, going back to my visit to England, such as St. Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne, my visit to FDR's home and library, and the recent Holiday Home Tour in New Orleans, and which I have not done. I must accept that I am only one person, and with my semblance to an offline life, I can do only so much with my blog.

Ann Fontaine sent me the link to a nightly prayer by Eleanor Roosevelt, which speaks strongly to me today. Thanks, Ann. I needed this.

But perhaps the most revealing insight into Eleanor Roosevelt’s spiritual life is found in the words of her nightly prayer. According to her son Elliott, every night after a very full day’s work, his mother would slip into her old blue robe and kneel beside her bed and pray:

Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.

When I visited my friend in Connecticut, we did not have time to visit Eleanor's retreat, Val-Kill. On my next visit, and I have been invited back, I'd very much like to go.

From the Anglican Examiner.