Prayers - Marilyn Monroe

MARILYN MONROE

Dear God of All People,

Fifty years after her death, apparently
caused purposefully or carelessly
by her own hand, an actress cynically promoted for brazen sensuality, retains
a hold on the public imagination as an object of enduring allure, sympathy, fascination
and pity.

As you, God, know, the smile and the charisma which You gave her still electrify
on the screen, and fascination
with her persona continues long after
her untimely demise.

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, to a mentally unstable mother, her father unidentified, Marilyn was consigned to a series of adoption homes and almost certainly suffered sexual abuse as a child on one or more occasions.

Her marriages to two powerful men,
Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller,
were futile ego-injurious failures for her.

I pray to You, Lord, for Marilyn, and for all the "Marilyns" in or out of public life,
who suffer abuse in their childhoods
and manifest misfortune in their marriages.

Let neither I nor others point
a judging finger at those in whose footsteps we have not walked.

All this I pray to You, Merciful God
and Creator of us all,
including Your sad, hapless Marilyn.

Amen

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