[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 38 (Tuesday, April 12, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                                 prayer

  The Chaplain, the Reverend Richard C. Halverson, D.D., offered the 
following prayer:
  Let us pray:
  For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the 
fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken 
cisterns, that can hold no water.--Jeremiah 2:13.
  Eternal God of truth and justice, help us to hear these words which 
You have spoken through Jeremiah, Your prophet. Help us comprehend the 
terrible consequences when we forsake Thee. G.K. Chesterton has said, 
``When we do not believe in God, the problem is not that we believe in 
nothing, but that we believe anything.'' Help us understand the 
disorientation when there is no God reference in our lives--no 
transcendent reality which gives meaning to life. Deliver us from the 
moral and ethical anarchy which is inevitable when we abandon the 
absolute. Move us to consider the profound question engraved on the 
wall of the Jefferson Memorial: ``Can the liberties of a nation be 
secure when we have removed from the hearts of the people the belief 
that those liberties are the gift of God?''
  Save us, patient Father, from our propensity to rebellious 
indifference toward Thee.
  In the name of our Lord and for the healing of the Nation, we pray. 
Amen.

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