DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN THE USA

Dear God of All Peoples,

I have learned that Americans have an idea
of what they think the distribution of wealth in our country should be, but according
to the Harvard Business School 2011 Survey, shown in the graph above, they have a very mistaken concept of the actuality. The wealthy have, for many years, become increasingly
and proportionally, richer, and the poor have become poorer and poorer.

The Top 20% of the U.S. population controls 80% of the country's wealth:

80% of us share the remaining 20%.

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures here
on earth," You have admonished us.

We surely must learn to share the wealth
and the food and all of our other earthly resources more much equitably than we are currently sharing, at least in America.

"The poor you will always have with you,"
Christ told us, but the disparity between rich and poor has so strained the economic fabric
of our society as to lead eventually perhaps
to the destruction of our republic, through
the egregious selfishness of the compassionless rich, and the murderous uprising and mob violence of the furious middle class
and the desperate restless poor.

You, Christ, were never more angry than when
You drove the money-changers out from
the Temple in Jerusalem.

Let us, Dear God, before it is too late,
find the ways, the means, and the will
to reduce the scandalous inequity between rich and poor, so that those "at the top" will have fair rewards for their effort, but those
"at the bottom" will not, for their heavy manual labor, fall beneath the level
of sustenance, survival, and human dignity.

Help those at the top realize that the riches
of this earth are not theirs alone, and that when we come to the end of our lives we will lose all we have, and will face a final Divine judgment and evaluation of how we used our material goods, not what we acquired.

If ours is ill-gotten gain, we may lose our own immortal souls along with our immoral accumulation of material goods.

I pray that somehow the rich, the middle class, the poor -- and our leaders, lawmakers
and politicians -- will all come to realize
that the current situation is unfair, untenable
and immoral, and that we must make
the necessary economic changes before some enormous economic catastrophe or social upheaval befalls us.

Lord, Jesus, please make America once more
a "Land of Opportunity," and a land of equals in which all can find respectable employment
at wages on which they can support themselves and their families in dignity.

Let not this country, once a shining beacon
of hope for all people, become a vicious land of the misers and the miserable.

All this I pray to You, God of Mercy,
God of Justice, God of Love, God of All People.

Amen