“Breathe into these bones and make them live.”

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I read these words from Ezekiel 37:9 today, and the first thing that came to my mind was the dancing skeletons of Halloween: grinning skulls, limbs akimbo, ghoulish humor a-flying. Not exactly what the prophet had in mind when he recorded this image some 2600 years ago, I think, but it did make me grin.

Still, I stayed with the words. As part of my spiritual practice, each day I pray with a reading from a sacred text, and these words called to me so strongly out of something I was reading that I decided to meditate upon them and see what opened up. This was not study; I was not trying to understand the meaning of Ezekiel’s text, but rather seeking to know what the divine was sending to me with these words.

What came before my mind's eye were the images of the scene just following the bombing in Boston: the chaos, people falling down, many hurt, some with lost limbs. As the phrase repeated like a mantra in my head and this image unfolded before my interior vision, I did not fully understand why these two were coming together, so I continued to sit, and repeat, and wait with an open heart.

Then my inner visual switched to a house near my own home, farther down the street, where I had recently seen a lot of cars parked in the yard over the course of multiple days, and many people wandering in and out all dressed nicely. Funeral clothes, I had realized; someone in that house had died. As I prayed Ezekiel’s prayer, I began to make the connection that I was being shown: it was not for the dead that I was praying, but for those left after the death. Not the person who died in my neighborhood, but those whose lives were forever changed by that death; not those who lost their lives in Boston, and not even just those who lost limbs, but those who lost something even more intrinsic: a certain kind of hope, a faith in themselves or the world or goodness.

I was praying for all who grieve, whether they grieve the loss of a loved one, a lost innocence, a happier worldview, the pain of others or their own brokenness. I was praying for the bones of kindness, charity and compassion which can become brittle and lifeless when we lose our vision of the beauty in the world and in each other.

And so I continue Ezekiel’s prayer tonight. Make these bones live, I pray, the bones of the ones left on the earth. The ones who can grieve themselves out of real life, or fear themselves out of it. The ones whose bones may clink as they continue walking but in whom the breath of full and conscious living is missing. Breathe into those who so very deeply need it; and with this inspiring, this in-breathing, bring to joyous life the bones of those whose grief has trapped them in a diminished field of existence. Breathe into these bones, and make them live.