Prayers for a Thousand Years

This is a different kind of book. It consists of hopeful thoughts and wished for the third millennium written by 250 world leaders and visionaries, most of them especially for this volume. The editors have published two earlier volumes, Earth Prayers and Life Prayers. They conceive of this volume as "a testament to what we love in this world…what we wish to save and invoke for the generations that will follow us, a testament of hope in a time beset with fears and uncertainty." It grew out of the editors’ belief that healing intention and prayer can be effective not only for individuals but at the level of whole nations and cultures. Thus, in collecting the best intentions for the coming 1,000 years, their hope is that it will be a factor in actually making realities of those well wishes.

The prayers and intentions are in ten sections: Visions of Hope, Opening Our Hearts, This Moment in Time, Creating Communities of Peace, For the Children, This Holy Earth, Prayers of Solidarity and Justice, Reflections on Volatile Economics and Morality; Parables in Our Time, and We the People. The contributions in the first nine sections are by individuals, whereas the final section consists of 10 declarations and chapters, which it is very good to know about and to be able to refer to. They are the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, The Kyoto Declaration, The Mount Abu Declaration, Preamble to Principles of Environmental Justice, The Peoples’ Earth Declaration, Preamble to the Declaration on a Global Ethic, The Beijing Declaration, and The Earth Charter.