FATHER NORMAN CLAYTON
0 Lord Our Heavenly Father and creator of the endless universe, we come before You this morning amazed at Your promise that You who have set the stars in their courses and painted gorgeously the humblest flower, will be in the midst of even two or three who gather together in Your name. Be with us, Lord, during the course of this week's congress, who have come from far and near to consider man's use and preservation of the splendid gifts You have so abundantly bestowed upon us. We come to You, too, with sorrow in our hearts as so many of the riches we have inherited are spoiled through ignorance, carelessness, neglect and greed. So we ask You to pardon all our shortcomings, and bless every endeavour to ensure that all Your gifts may be conserved for our benefit when in need, and for our delight in every waking hour. May our ignorance be enlightened, our carelessness curbed. May neglect make way for care, and concern for others and generations yet unborn, dispel all greed and selfishness among us. And we come before You, too, this morning with great thanksgiving in our hearts for so many beautiful and valuable things in our natural heritage, for which catalogues are inadequate as they are too numerous and too varied to detail. So we simply praise You for colours and shapes and textures, for pleasant perfumes and joyous sounds, for tastes and for movement, and every pulsating throb of the fascinating world in which You have placed us. And we come before You acutely aware that You declared in the beginning: let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. You created man in Your own image, Lord, just a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour and set over the works of Your hands. In this sublime context, and in the loving awareness of our responsibilities, we dedicate this international wilderness congress, its deliberations, its sharings and its aspirations, to Your greater glory and for the joy and welfare of every man. And in acknowledgement of our ultimate dependence upon You, we sum up all our prayers this morning in the words which Your Divine Son taught us, and say together: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. God bless you and may this congress be a happy and a fruitful one.
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