Friday, July 28, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Thou shalt
Lord, you have the words of everlasting life.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.
I had it in mind to think through today’s lectionary reading of the ten commandments, but then my friend Jason asked me for a selection of liturgies and liturgical prayers, and I realize that the ten commandments are guiding us, all of us, into what we DO. What we DON’T DO is just a path to what we DO, DO.
O Love,
I don’t know how to pray.
I have nothing to say,
no idea what I should be thinking
or even listening for.
So I will sit quietly with you,
as if holding hands on a park bench.
I hold this space in me,
this not knowing, this emptiness,
and in this wilderness in me
you pray.
And I adore.
Here are a few prayers I appreciate very much:
- MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. – Thomas Merton
- Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I own and all I have, You gave to me, to you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours, dispose of it according to your will. Give me your love and grace, this is enough for me. – Ignatius, his Suscipe (which means “receive”)
- This is from the Chaplet of Divine Mercy:
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. (x10) Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Dearly Beloved Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
- The Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. (or any shortened version)
5. Luther’s evening prayer (I prayed this with my mom in the last years of her life when I stayed with her now and then):
Luther’s Evening Prayer
I thank you, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have graciously kept me this day; and I pray that You would forgive me all my sins where I have done wrong, and graciously keep me this night. For into Your hands, I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things.
and Luther’s morning prayer as well:
“I thank you, my Heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have kept me this night from all harm and danger; and I pray that You would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You. For into Your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things. Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen.”
- Catholics call this the “Glory Be“:
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
- Prayer of St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- And a liturgical prayer from John of the Cross:
To reach satisfaction in all, desire its possession in nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing.
To come to possess all, desire to possess nothing.
To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not,
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not,
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not,
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not,
you must go by a way in which you are not.
When you turn toward something, you cease to cast yourself upon the all;
For to go from the all to the all, you must leave yourself in all.
And when you come to the possession of all,
you must possess it without wanting anything.
In this nakedness the spirit finds its rest, for when it desires nothing,
nothing raises it up,
and nothing weighs it down,
because it is in the center of its humility.
One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah, the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.
In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah, the sheer grace! –
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.
On that glad night
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything
with no other light or guide
than the One that burned in my heart.
This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.
O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the Beloved into his Lover.
Upon my flowering breast,
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.
I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
- And finally one of many poems by Mary Oliver that lend themselves to liturgy:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(Exodus 20, Psalm 19, Luke 8, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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