"Can we all get along?"

A PRAYER FOR THE BOSTON MARATHON TRAGEDY

Sometimes there are no words, just images....

The painted carving of St. Mary hugging baby Jesus (I like to think of her as hugging me) is from a crèche set. I gave St. Joseph to a Colombian friend.

The statue of St. Francis of Assisi with a heart around his neck was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that brought the San Francisco Bay Area to its knees. The famous prayer of St. Francis begins, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love..."

The terra cotta monk represents mystics of all religions, from the Baal Shem Tov in Judaism to St. Francis in Christianity to the Sufis in Islam, to name just the faiths that descend from Abraham.

The card with three pink flowers is from a friend in the Peace Corps in Indonesia.

The black-framed image of Madonna and Child is from a Jesuit friend in Zambia (Central Africa).

The painting is "The Blessing Christ" by Hans Memling, from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus proclaimed, "Blessed are the peacemakers....."

The red silk garland was draped around my neck as I left Madras by a soon-to-be bishop of the Church of South India. (The CSI is a union of the Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.)

As Rodney King, cruelly beaten by the Los Angeles police, pleaded:
CAN WE ALL GET ALONG? CAN WE PLEASE JUST GET ALONG?