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Affirmations Benedictions Blessings Chalice Lightings Closings Invocations Litanies Meditations Openings Poetry Prayers Readings Responsive Readings Rituals Stories
Earthquake

Earthquake

(Ahmedabad, India, 2001) Mother Earth is shouting but we do not hear. She is filled with anguish, for all we understand is death. And in her agony she suffers too over the fact that she must kill her own to get our attentionn...

M Marta I. Valentín
Vanishing Song Birds

Vanishing Song Birds

I understand history as possibility...that could also stop being a possibility. —Paulo Freire The winds of extinction sing a mournful song in the rustling grass, where the bobwhite drums and the meadowlark's melody is vanishing. The winds of extinction sing a mournful song in the dark forest...

S Stephen M. Shick
Earth

Earth

This is our earth. It falls through heaven like a pearl in a glass of plum wine. There are no other earths that I know of. There are no other skies that we have mapped. This is our earth. The Oneness who gave birth to it remains nameless. There was no midwife then to bring us word of the birth-cry.

M Mark Belletini
Communion Circle

Communion Circle

The earth. One planet. Round, global, so that when you trace its shape with your finger, you end up where you started. It's one. It's whole. All the dotted lines we draw on our maps of this globe are just that, dotted lines. They smear easily. Oceans can be crossed. Even the desert can be crossed.

M Mark Belletini
Poem in a Time of Peril

Poem in a Time of Peril

Of course truth is hard. It is a rock. Yet I do not think it will fall upon me And crush me. I do not think they can hammer it to bits And stone me. Help me place the rock in the strong current Of these rushing waters. I must climb upon it. I must know how truth feels....

B Barbara Rohde
The Return of Earth/She

The Return of Earth/She

The Earth has returned. She is living, breathing, Realizing her breath was leaving. She was needing us to remember her worth, to recognize her worth all over again. We used to be her friends. We used to help her heal us. Help her, heal us. Help her heal us....

C Christopher Sims
Suppose

Suppose

Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? —Kabir Suppose you cried a thousand years for a child who died when she drank bad water. Suppose you organized a great movement to clean the water. Suppose you carried the first filled glass to the...

S Stephen M. Shick
Nourished

Nourished

When I look up into the night sky, I am in awe of all that is. There in a far away galaxy A star has died, Yet it is still bright for my eyes to see. And make a wish upon When I walk in the ocean I feel the waves rush across my feet And I feel a certain peace with the world I peer out into the...

J Jay Wolin
Deal with God

Deal with God

Sometimes I offer to make a deal with God. “I’ll tell you about my resistance to prayer,” I say, “If you’ll explain the Holocaust.” God declines to comment, and the lawyers make their prepared statements on his behalf. I kind of hate when he does that. I love God best, I confess, when I...

B Bob Janis-Dillon
Sabr wa Iman (Patience and Faith)

Sabr wa Iman (Patience and Faith)

We need resilience, perseverance, and persistence.

S Summer Albayati
Redwing Blackbird

Redwing Blackbird

I look up and experience her music as a Beatitude of Peace, a feathery sonnet that rings of grace and hope...

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Revolutionary Love

Revolutionary Love

Together we create a love energy more powerful than any force of oppression…

D Dayna Edwards
No Place

No Place

Where do you keep your love? Invite love in.

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Perfect, Love

Perfect, Love

Later, poets would tell of stars, shepherds, and seers, songs of angels…

D Daniel S. Schatz
Hug the Prayer

Hug the Prayer

Hug the prayer before it leaves your body. Float it along like murmuring leaves.…

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Transformations

Transformations

…it is enough to release the piercing frigidity, the brittle rigidity of ice— and embrace the versatile, vital, blessing, bathing, embodiment of water.

N Nicholas D’Agosto
When I Feel Helpless

When I Feel Helpless

If I can do nothing more, I go out the back door and sit on the steps where the tuxedo cat rubs my leg and I look for the holy.…

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Hope, Nearly Not There

Hope, Nearly Not There

There’s no package called hope. Nothing at a shop to look for. Hope won’t store like hay in a barn. It is a last leaf on a branch in deep winter. It is a singular thing, firm when it’s found—a hand reached out. A word to the marrow. Hope is fine-grained, like lavender gone to seed. Gossamer,...

D David Breeden
When Your Best Friend Has Four or So Legs

When Your Best Friend Has Four or So Legs

What it means to have a pet is to love someone who speaks a language you do not. A dog will bow and prance, a cat will purr and blink. A guinea pig will giggle and squeak. A long time ago a friend of mine had a dog with soft ears, and considered herself the pup’s guardian....

J Julián Jamaica Soto
A Blessing for the Front Lines

A Blessing for the Front Lines

Oh you You rebel You queer and wayward child You abandoned and listless You angry and forgotten You brown and black and indigenous You homeless and impoverished You dreamer You warrior You are not alone here You have never been alone Not in this place, not in this time Not in the whole of history...

A Anna Geoffroy
A Prayer for Salvation

A Prayer for Salvation

Here I am, God, here I am. Here I am with the dishes in the sink, the dust on the shelves, the skin on my hands which is drying out and starting to crack. My appetite has gone, without any other bodies to remind my body of itself. I can pray for salvation but my bones know this is all there is....

P Peregrine Morkal-Williams
Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice

Perhaps for a moment the typewriters will stop clicking, the wheels stop rolling the computers desist from computing, and a hush will fall over the city....

R Rebecca Ann Parker
Pandemic

Pandemic

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your...

L Lynn Ungar
Forgive Me

Forgive Me

Forgive me dear father For all the trouble I caused The missed curfews The missed classes Your unfulfilled dreams for me Forgive me dear father But your dreams are not my dreams Forgive me dear father And I will forgive you For missed moments That you sacrificed So that one day I could follow my...

J Jay Wolin
Creator

Creator

Inhale—you are Creation. Exhale—you are Creator.

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Sleep Will Come Upon Our Eyelids

Sleep Will Come Upon Our Eyelids

Sleep will come upon our eyelids and they will not ever be lifted again.

J Jacob Trapp
Miriam's Daughter

Miriam's Daughter

We must be willing and prepared to dance with joy when liberation arrives.

M Mandie McGlynn
The Stream

The Stream

we are here, and flowing, in and of, made of, because of You

V Vanessa Titang
Living

Living

We are living today with time to do good for ourselves and for each other.

C Charles Thomas
Let Us Give Thanks for the Whistleblowers

Let Us Give Thanks for the Whistleblowers

Let us grieve for our own pain, as oppressions / come between us, as sharp / as broken glass.

F Frances Koziar
Holy Discomfort and Holy Disruption

Holy Discomfort and Holy Disruption

Discomfort /in the name of holy wholeness / Bring all of ourselves / in the name of holy, of wholeness

K Kiakiali Bordner
Say the Word

Say the Word

I never heard the word abortion in church when I was a child.

E Eileen Casey-Campbell
Assume Goodwill

Assume Goodwill

I cannot assume anything when you welcome me into your spaces with suspicion and fear.

K Kristen L. Harper
Ramadan Home

Ramadan Home

Ramadan, never forgotten, entices me back to Love, and I am home once again

S Summer Albayati
The Colors of Communion

The Colors of Communion

I am singing/of the wonder of how roots/so love the buds they bid them grow...

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Home Gone

Home Gone

Miles away in a different life...

S Sharon Scholl
A Winter Blessing

A Winter Blessing

Love this world, she whispers.

R Rebecca Ann Parker
Beneath the Slow Stars — Approaching Solstice

Beneath the Slow Stars — Approaching Solstice

There in the deep sack of night, a tiny Hope was born.

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter
Origins

Origins

What is the history of any thing? This apple, let's say, that my grandson just picked as he sits on my shoulders, feet dangling like parentheses around my heart?...

P Peter Friedrichs
Release

Release

I wish I were like the trees, Who let their leaves go gracefully, without regret. Or the tumbling stream that flushes silt to sea, Exchanging murkiness for blessed clarity. Or the dandelion, who bows its head to the subtle breeze, Unleashing its future without fear or loss. Instead, I drive...

P Peter Friedrichs
In the Ruins

In the Ruins

A man sits on the rubble— not just in the rubble, but on the pile of what remains. No people in the bombed-out houses. No dogs. No birds. Just ragged hunks of concrete and loss. And on his perch he is playing an instrument constructed of what is left—an olive oil can, a broom handle, a bowed...

L Lynn Ungar
Let the Artists Win

Let the Artists Win

I vote we let the artists win the ones covered in paint from their last attempt to smuggle across the beauty of a bowl of fruit the 14-year-old rapper learning to spit throwing life's chaos on the rhythm wheel uncovering the shapes that live on after the next break I say we let the food bank...

B Bob Janis-Dillon
Each New Day

Each New Day

Why is this blank page staring back at me, mocking, like an affliction, and fraught with dread? How can it hold such sway, this simple emptiness? Might it instead be a gift left on my doorstep overnight, waiting to be broken open with the dawn?...

P Peter Friedrichs
Desire

Desire

I want not dainty bone china-cupped, oh-so-polite, pinky-extended sips, but guzzle-by-the-gallon, drink-from-the-fire-hose- two-hundred-eighty-psi- Niagara-Falls volumes, and inch-thick slices of hearty multi-grain-hard-crusted- with-stick-in-your-teeth-seeds-bread (none of that bland supermarket...

P Peter Friedrichs
I have always hated to wait for things

I have always hated to wait for things

Through the windy night something is coming up the path towards the house. I have always hated to wait for things. I think I will go to meet whatever it is.

E Elizabeth Coatsworth
The First Pair of Underpants

The First Pair of Underpants

I wonder Did God’s heart (I mean the love-mushy, endearing part of God) That part The heart that I don’t really believe in as a thing, With pulses... ANYWAY Did that heart Did it Break just a little; When God realized "Oh no— They have made leaves into underpants!" If God says things like...

R Robin Tanner
Inexplicable

Inexplicable

Inexplicable. How we rise each morning, instead of burying our heads under bedcovers, sewing them shut. Why we keep on welcoming babies with bone-deep joy to this sordid world. How we fill burlap sacks with grit and gratitude, our hands shredded as we drag one over the other....

K Karen G. Johnston
It Is Not Always Easy to Find Love at the Center

It Is Not Always Easy to Find Love at the Center

We gather in covenant to celebrate the reality that love is at the core of our beings and that love will guide us if we open ourselves to the challenges which love requires of us.

E Esther Hurlburt
Agenda

Agenda

The agenda looks long. When will I get home? What surprises and big decisions await us?

L Lisa Smith-Horn
Gift from the Geese

Gift from the Geese

High up, the wild geese have pulled the rusty doorway of Autumn closed behind them, their sharp music a choir of deep acoustic truth.

J Jennifer Pratt-Walter