[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 2794]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

                                 PRAYER

  The Chaplain, the Reverend Daniel P. Coughlin, offered the following 
prayer:
  Isaias begins his message with these words: ``Hear, O heavens, and 
listen, O earth, for the Lord speaks.''
  All the heavens and all the earth cannot grasp or contain Your Word, 
O Lord. Once spoken and unleashed upon our world, Your word catapults 
imaginings to their heights and penetrates everything to its depths. 
May our hearing turn to listening and our listening make us so 
attentive that it leads to new understanding and new ways of acting.
  Your Word provokes Isaias to cry out to the people: If only we were 
free enough to be raised up by its power or strong enough to be 
embraced by its full passion! Then we like Isaias would be able to 
hear, in our broadcasted news, the voice of violence coming from our 
own children. And we would lament as a nation searching for prophetic 
vision until we and our ways of acting change. We pray for this vision 
now and forever. Amen.

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