Dear God, January 1, 2013

Thank you for this day, God. I am glad I'm here and now. There have been times in the past years when I was wrong and wanted to not be here and now. Please let me take that back now. When I was thinking death thank you for disregarding those thoughts. Also God thank you for  overlooking my desire to kill at times as well. Forgive me for my sharp anger at people who have harmed me and thank you for not holding me accountable for my first thought, only my second thought and my actions.
Let my first thoughts this year be more loving and kind even when things are not as I would want them. Thank you for my family and friends, the human race at large, and the relationships we have together with all animals, fish, plants, indeed the whole universe and multiverse as well.
Thank you for letting me stay on this planet even though there have been times when I've pleaded with you to get me off.
Help me this year be less judgemental especially of stupid people who are the most dangerous in the world and usually don't know it or acknowledge it. Also help me be less afraid of those who are living lives of quiet desperation clinging to some semblance of existence and are believing themselves peaceful because they've never been challenged so are the most unpredictable. Help me move slowly and calmly in their presence and not trigger them to flare up or hurt themselves or others. Help me most when these people are very big and ferocious in positions of great power and authority and believe themselves to be immutable and right despite their own history and our collective history of fallibility.Teach me more to speak softly and walk more gently.
Help me Lord in my search to know you better. Either be louder or make me quieter. Help me to know you more and to follow you more because in your uniqueness I know my own. I would be more understanding that I might understand more. Let me love again without fear of consequences. Help me to be like a child again with innocence rather than naivety. Help me to be more wise than clever. Help me be loving.
And please God answer some of the why's in my life. Why for instance does it seem that bad people are rewarded for a time whereas when I do things that I know are bad I'm not. Why is it that those I love the most I see so little of but am so often put upon by the least appealing of authorities. Help me to avoid the devil, the satanic in language or action. I know this 'old language' upsets people who are immersed in the new 'groupthink' and its subtle ways of deceit and demonic but let me never forget traditions so I  see the old in the new and the new in the old. Help me to choose what is best not based on prejudice or novelty but rather on the purpose and meaning of a thing and time and place.
Help me to bring love into my life by my being more truly loving and not just sentimental. Help me to know discernment. Help me to separate pleasure from obsession and compulsion. Help me to know the line between eros and lust, between enjoying a meal and being gluttonous, relaxing rather than being slothful. Help me to be the human my dog thinks I am.
Give me more courage that I may come close in awe to you and all that is you, oh Lord, that other who is lovingly beyond all I can comprehend and know in my finitude and materialism. Help me to appreciate and celebrate transcendnce and the existential otherness of you Lord, the greatest of known unknowables. Let me cuddle in your alien kindness.
Thank you Lord for another year of opportunity for me to rise about the negative emotions of fear, anger, shame, guilt and judgementalness, pomposity, separateness and stupidity. Help me to be enlightened ,to pray more deeply, to meditate more vastly and be in your presence in all my relationships with family and friends and especially strangers. Help me to know Christ's love in face of the Pontius Pilates, Herods and Judas of today.
Let me walk up the mountain with Moses and be in your presence. Help me to follow whatever tablets you give me me and those you give to others that are meant for me as well. Help me to choose rightly the important in the cacophony of competing causes and demands for my attention when I would only give my attention to the purest and simplest of you. Emanual, God with us, let me know a closer walk with you Lord and make me an instrument of your love and your peace this year.
Help me to know and use money as a spiritual energy and avoid the waste of this resources as I struggle to avoid the waste of any resource. Help me to  learn to turn dross to gold and find the jewel in the rough every time. Help me to see the future in the brightness of today. Help me help others without losing myself or becoming ill.
Thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus. Thanks to all the saints and Mary, Mother of God. May I feel more deeply the trinitarian love of fellowship and know that we are your feet and hands. Let my heart beat for you God of Gods, all loving, all knowing, all of all. And never let me forget the  "nada" of St. John of the Cross for you are the  alpha and omega, the beginning and the end and all that is between. Amen.