[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 9]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 12593]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         A MEMORIAL DAY PRAYER

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHRISTOPHER SHAYS

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 13, 2005

  Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, I wish to insert in the Congressional Record 
the following Memorial Day Prayer as offered by the Reverend Dean C. 
Ahlberg of The First Church of Christ in Redding, Connecticut.

                          Memorial Day Prayer

       Loving and Gracious God, we gather together on this 
     Memorial Day weekend, young and old, diverse in political 
     perspective, religious affiliation and ethnic heritage, yet 
     we gather in our too-often divided nation as one community to 
     offer a united tribute, a testimony of gratitude, and a 
     celebration of remembrance.
       We gather, O God, to honor those veterans who've nobly 
     served this nation we love and who've walked beside us and 
     with us this day; we gather to remember those men and women, 
     patriots who fought and died, who offered up the supreme 
     sacrifice to defend the country we love, to protect the 
     freedoms we enjoy and too often take for granted, and to 
     advance the cause of liberty for humankind. We remember 
     Reddingites who perished in the Revolutionary war, and those 
     whose legacy echoes from places named Antietam, and Bull Run 
     and Gettysburg; we remember the gallantry of doughboys, the 
     bravery enshrined on battlefields from the Marne to Iwo lima, 
     from Bastogne to Korea, from the jungles of Viet Nam to the 
     mountains of Afghanistan to the streets, cities and villages 
     of Iraq. And we humbly offer prayers, not only for their 
     patriotic souls, but also for the families they left behind, 
     and for families who, even now, pray each day for the safe 
     return of a soldier son or daughter, father or mother.
       Thus we ask your guidance, O Holy One. We ask your guidance 
     that our patriotism be filtered through the prism of your 
     divine justice and love, that our nation's power might ever 
     serve the cause of human dignity, that our most noble 
     impulses be laced with humility and a wisdom that fosters 
     solidarity and understanding among the world's nations.
       And so we must close our prayers this Memorial Day weekend, 
     O God, with a prayer for ourselves and our own stewardship of 
     our beloved democracy. Give us, we pray, the strength, the 
     grit and the insight to be citizen soldiers in the cause of 
     peace . . . such that our children and our children's 
     children never know the horrors of war . . . that our 
     collective legacy might be a world of greater harmony, a 
     nation of less internal enmity, and a community with an 
     unwavering appreciation for all who've labored and fought, 
     lived and died, to make our nation a beacon of light and our 
     flag a signal of hope for all your peoples. May God bless the 
     United States of America. And may each one of us, in ways 
     great and small, be a blessing to our nation, and to God's 
     world. Amen.

                          ____________________