[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13599]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



  The House met at 10 a.m.
  The Reverend W. Douglas Tanner, Jr., President, The Faith & Politics 
Institute, Washington, D.C., offered the following prayer:
  Almighty God, we come before You this morning conscious that 230 
years ago next Tuesday, the Founders of our Nation declared certain 
truths to be self-evident: that You created us all equal and endowed us 
with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For the 
clarity of their insight, we are profoundly grateful. For the myriad of 
ways even they found to disregard those truths, and the ways we 
continue to, we seek Your pardon.
  Thomas Jefferson wrote, ``Indeed I tremble for my country when I 
reflect that God is just.'' We, too, should tremble; sometimes we do. 
Yet we trust in Your grace and mercy to save us from both our 
adversaries and ourselves.
  Guide us, we pray, to understand as Reinhold Niebuhr that nothing 
that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must 
be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes 
complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must 
be saved by faith. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the 
standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. 
Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is 
forgiveness.
  Amen.

                          ____________________