Category: Prayers
Wonder and Awe
One of the resources that I am constantly looking for is liturgy/poetry/prayers that I might share in worship. I have several books that I really like including Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth by Walter Brueggemann which I highly recommend. I have also found a few blogs including one called [hold :: this space]. It is described by the author as, “the story of an alternative worship project in the Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania.”
I found the following poem there this morning and I’m thinking about reading it in worship tomorrow night during our prayer time. I think I found it especially moving given the topic of the Disciple Bible study class I facilitated yesterday where the key word was Wonder. I hope you find it meaningful for you today as well. If you know of any additional resources like the ones I mentioned above or if you yourself are in to writing prayers/poems/liturgy, I’d love to hear about it! Just leave me a comment.
there are some moments
at which we should only look sideways
because to face them head on will blind us
moments where words like wonder
and awe
are completely inadequate;
where we search in vain for new words
as yet uninvented
to tell of the truth
moments where it seems impossible
that we will ever forget
how extraordinary,
how remarkable
this life is.
until we do
so in this moment,
when we stand blinded by fragility
and wonder
we pause
and for all those moments we forget,
we take a breath
and say
thank you.
Category: Prayers
A Father’s prayer
Five days before my son was born, I wrote this prayer in my journal. I was thinking about Jack’s arrival and expressing my anxiety about everyone being OK. I’m blessed to say that those concerns are fine. Jack and mom are doing great. I didn’t write this to share it, but perhaps it will be an encouragement to someone else.
God, thank you for the gift of my children. Help me to always recognize the great trust and faith you have placed in me to be their father. Give me wisdom to guide and direct them and the patience to stay in step with your grace working in their lives.
Help me to love their mother and care for her in such a way that my daughter will know what it looks like to be cherished and my son will recognize what it means to be a true husband, partner and friend. I ask your blessing God fully aware of your call on my life to be a blessing to others. Amen.
Category: Prayers
A prayer by Walter Breuggemann
You, you are the one we address,
always you,
only you… who has given us life,
who waits for us to answer.
We, toward you, speak and remain tongue-tied,
for we lack words that are honest enough,
and dangerous enough,
and fierce enough to match you.
We do not speak first, but after our mothers and fathers,
who knew cadences of honesty about our troubles,
who knew cadences of danger about your presence,
who knew cadences of fierceness to fit our rage and loss.
So we speak to you words that we have always spoken:
words of praise and adoration:
…into your gates with thanksgiving
into your courts with praise…
words of confession and remorse:
…against you and only you have we sinned…
words of thanks and astonishment:
…you have turned our mourning into dancing…
words of rage unabated:
…dash their heads against the rocks.
So many words we need to speak
to you from whom no secret can be hid,
you beyond us, you with us, you for us,
you with ears bent close to our lips,
You…and our woes turned toward you, always you, only you,
yet again you.
Amen.
Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann
Category: Prayers
May God bless you with discomfort
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitations of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
-A Fransiscan Blessing
Category: Prayers
Prayer for the Week
As I’ve shared before, one of the disciplines that I enjoy is the Daily Office. Each week, there is a different “prayer for the week” that you read everyday. I thought I would share this week’s prayer.
Almighty and merciful God, in your goodness keep me, I pray, from all things that may hurt me, that I, being ready both in mind and body, may accomplish with a free heart those things which belong to your purpose; through Jesus Christ my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. AMEN.
When I worked with High School students, I use to say to them that maturity in faith comes when we agree with God’s evaluation of what is truly dangerous to our lives. I know that my life changed dramatically when I began to see the Bible in a different way; not a set of rules and regulations designed to “steal” life, but rather a guide for experience the “fullness” of life. I think that is why John 10:10 where Jesus says that he has come to “give life and life to the full,” has always been a key verse for me. That thought stuck in my mind today as I read this prayer for the week.
Category: Prayers
Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Category: Prayers
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