Shield the Joyous

I’ve started praying a very specific prayer every time I see the news of another school shooting: shield the joyous, Lord. It has become an important part of my greater prayer that violence may cease and that we may turn our swords into plowshares.

This one line prayer I hold comes from a longer closing prayer in Compline, the fullness of which I love.  In Compline we pray:

Keep watch, dear Lord, over those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, and shield the joyous.; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

But there’s something about that part of the prayer–“shield the joyous”–that keeps emerging from my heart when I am swept up in the tides of grief over every school shooting.

“Shield the joyous” almost feels like an aside in the prayer; it’s part of a much longer list of petitions: keeping watch over those who labor in the evening, those who sleep, those who are sick and weary, and those who may not make it through the night. The prayer also asks us to soothe the suffering and pity the afflicted–yet another urgent prayer I pray, given the violence in our world.

But when I think of children going to school to learn active shooter drills, who must be praying it will remain only a drill, and the teachers who must act as their protectors, even though they need protection just as much as any other, my heart breaks.  

So this prayer meets me in that heartbrokenness to remind me to beg God to please, Lord, shield the joyous.  

Lord, when you soothe the suffering, please soothe the families who have already lost beloveds in this violence. When you pity the afflicted, do not only pity them but restore them and give them hope.  God, in your power and mercy, shield the joyous so they may–in the tenderness of their youth–escape childhood with even an ounce of the innocence they deserve. Let their cries of laughter call us to remember how your Son, Jesus Christ, drew the children close to him, such that we–as followers of Christ–must remember that being Christlike means drawing children close to us, too, through holding their safety as a concern more primary than our own. 

I will never understand a world that chooses violence over peace, but it is the sea I swim in. In this tumultuous sea, the prayer I hold in my heart, the prayer that stretches out an arm to me like Jesus reaching for sea-tossed disciples, is simply: shield the joyous.  

May we remember that being Christlike means drawing these children close to us, through holding their safety as a concern more primary than our own.