Prayer before the Imposition of Ashes

Our ancestors in the faith
used ashes as a sign of our repentance,
a symbol of the uncertainty and fragility
of human life.
Like them, we have tasted the ashes of hopelessness;
we have walked through the ashes
of our loss and pain;
we have stood knee-deep
in the ashes of our brokenness.

God of our lives,
out of the dust of creation
you have formed us and given us life.
May these ashes not only be a sign
of our repentance and death,
but reminders that by your gift of grace
in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer,
we are granted life forever with you.

Amen.

--Thom Shuman, from Lectionary Liturgies

Psalm 84

How lovely is thy dwelling,

Great god, to whom all greatness is belonging!

       To view thy courts far, far from any telling

My soul doth long and pine with longing

                 Unto the God that liveth,

                 The God that all life giveth,

       My heart and body both aspire,

       Above delight, beyond desire.

       Alas, the sparrow knoweth

The house where free and fearless she resideth;

       Directly to the nest the swallow goeth,

Where with her sons she safe abideth.

                Oh, altars thine, most mighty

                 In war, yea, most almighty:

       Thy altars, Lord, ah, why should I

       From altars thine excluded lie?

       Oh, happy who remaineth

Thy household-man and still thy praise unfoldeth!

       Oh, happy who himself on thee sustaineth,

Who to thy house his journey holdeth!

                 Me seems I see them going

                 Where mulberries are growing:

       How wells they dig in thirsty plain,

       And cisterns make for falling rain.

       Me seems I see augmented

Still troop with troop, till all at length discover

       Zion, where to their sight is represented

The Lord of hosts, the Zion lover.

                 O Lord, O God, most mighty

                 In war, yea, most almighty:

       Hear what I beg; hearken, I say,

       O Jacob’s God, to what I pray.

       Thou art the shield us shieldeth:

Then, Lord, behold the face of thine anointed

       One day spent in thy courts more comfort yieldeth

Than thousands otherwise appointed.

                 I count it clearer pleasure

                 To spend my age’s treasure

       Waiting a porter at thy gates

       Than dwell a lord with wicked mates.

       Thou art the sun that shineth;

Thou art the buckler, Lord that us defendeth:

       Glory and grace Jehovah’s hand assigneth

And good without refusal sendeth

                 To him who truly treadeth

                 The path to pureness leadeth.

       O Lord of might, thrice blessed he

       Whose confidence is built on thee.

--Mary Sidney Herbert, (1561-1621), Countess of Pembroke,  English poet

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the web

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet, US Poet Laureate 1949-1950, and Pulitzer Prize winner, from A Cold Spring (1955)

Prayer on Psalm 51

(based on Psalm 51)

“But you desire honesty from the heart,

so you can teach me to be wise in my inmost being.”

Psalm 51:6 

Not just in my heart
but in the secret space
it holds.

In the heart of my heart.
In the place where I am myself.
In the space that I protect the most
and share the least.

In the hidden chamber
that I sometimes close off
even from myself.

In the realm
where you wait
and watch,
where you see each thing
that lies in shadow,
where you know the names
of all that makes its home
in me.

Here
in my secret heart:
here
teach me to move
with your wisdom,
to open the doors
that will draw me deeper still,
to live in the truth
that you desire;
here
let me open
the windows wide
so that those who pass by
will see you
looking out.

--Jan L. Richardson (1947- ), American Methodist poet, teacher, and artist, and posted on The Painted Prayerbook. 

Blessing (Psalm 51)

(inspired by Psalm 51)

May God create in you a clean heart,
a transformed heart,
a heart that knows and seeks and loves
the justice and mercy of the Lord.

May you accept the gift of salvation –
not your personal possession to be coveted,
but His work, accomplished in the destruction of Sin
on the cross of Jesus Christ.

And may you humble yourself before the Lord,
coming before Him with a broken spirit,
a contrite heart
receiving from His hand
great compassion and unfailing love.

--posted on Jeff’s Blog. 

Epiphany blessing

“He is my chosen one, and I am pleased with him.

I have put my Spirit upon him.

He will reveal justice to the nations.” Isaiah 42:1

May the path
that Christ walks
to bring justice
upon the earth,
to bring light
to those who sit
in darkness,
to bring out those
who live in bondage,
to bring new things
to all creation:
may this path
run through our life.
May we be
the road Christ takes.

-- Jan Richardson (1947- ), American Methodist poets, writer, teacher, and artist, from The Painted Prayerbook. 

A Poem of Thanks

I have been spared another day
to come into this night
as though there is a mercy in things
mindful of me. Love, cast all
thought aside. I cast aside
all thought. Our bodies enter
their brief precedence,
surrounded by their sleep.
Through you I rise, and you
through me, into the joy
we make, but may not keep.

--Wendell Berry (1935- ), American poet, essayist, agrarian, and farmer, from New Collected Poems, 2012

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, 
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flag
 quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell (1917-1977), from Collected Poems, 2003.



Image: Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, By Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1888.