Maybe this yellow gosling is riding out a storm that's whipped up the lake waters. Perhaps a turtle has snapped at his webbed feet, or an owl has honed in too close for comfort. Now he's tucked in safely beneath his mother's wing. The wing restores confidence: safety, peace and security.
An older Austrian friend told me of the night Hitler's blackshirts took over the opera house as she sat in the waiting audience. The performance was cancelled and everyone was sent out into the night. A great loss of confidence and insecurity started to cover the newly annexed country: people becoming suspicious of each other, not knowing what to do, hateful rhetoric springing up among groups.
And today, people are feeling greatly dismayed - some saying, "I can't believe what I'm hearing," with regard to events far away or close to home. One interviewed television guest asked this week, "Come the day after Election Day in November will the people of this country ever be able to love each other again? Will we ever again feel ourselves to be a United States of America?"
So here is a sensitive and beautiful prayer found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It is titled simply, "For Quiet Confidence." I think I'd nuance it a bit: A Prayer for Quiet Confidence in Disquieting Times. We might pray it every morning at the start of a new day.
O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
