Prayer of St. Aidan of Landisfarne

Leave me alone with God as much as may be.
As the tide draws the waters close in upon the shore,
Make me an island, set apart,
Alone with you, God, holy to you.
Then with the turning of the tide
Prepare me to carry your presence to the busy world beyond,
The world that rushes in on me,
Till the waters come again and fold me back to you.

-- St. Aidan of Landisfarne (590-651), converter of the Anglo-Saxons in Northumbria from Iona, patron of firefighters, whose feast day is today.

Prayer of St. Brendan the Navigator

Lord, I will trust You,

Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.
Give me faith to leave the old ways and break fresh ground with you.

Christ of the mysteries,
Can I trust You to be stronger than each storm in me?
Do I still yearn for Your glory to lighten me?

I will show others the care You’ve given me.
I will determine amidst all uncertainty always to trust.
I choose to live beyond regret, and let You recreate my life.

I believe You will make a way for me and provide for me, if only I trust You and obey.
I will trust in the darkness and know that my times are still in Your hand.
I will believe You for my future, chapter by chapter, until the story is written.

Focus my mind and my heart upon You, my attention always on You without alteration.
Strengthen me with Your blessing and appoint to me the task.
Teach me to live with eternity in view.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven.
Feed me, and, somehow, make my obedience count for You.

-- St. Brendan of Clonfert (the Navigator) (484-577 CE), Irish patron saint of Kerry and Clonfert, founder of a monastery in the Aran Islands, monastic and sailor, one of the "Twelve Apostles of Ireland" who is renowned for his sea journey with 16 other monks to find the Isle of the Blessed, aka the Garden of Eden.

Museum of Stones

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin, 

collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct, 

battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir— 

stones, loosened by tanks in the streets, 

from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen, 

schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse, 

pebble from Baudelaire’s oui, 

stone of the mind within us 

carried from one silence to another, 

stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende, 

agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards, 

chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs, 

stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold, 

stone from the tunnel lined with bones, 

lava of a city’s entombment, stones 

chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium, 

paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown, 

those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions, 

feldspar, rose quartz, blue schist, gneiss, and chert, 

fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe 

of a Buddha mortared at Bamian, 

stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt, 

from a chimney where storks cried like human children, 

stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart, 

altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, load and hail, 

bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with, 

stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake, 

concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf, 

all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk 

with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, 

would become a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred 

like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

--Carolyn Forché, (1950- ), American poet, translator, and editor, from In the Lateness of the World, 2020.

Poem: St. Brendan's Prayer

Sky, sky, sky is the word,

Just one shout in the direction

Of the blue vastness which weighs

Nothing and everything,

No one word can convey

How sky stings, pierces and turns

Inside out the heart of a man,

Scourges him delirious with the question

He is but cannot frame, because

Sky frames all questions, always

Stretching the asked and the asker

To the limitless blue

Upon blue upon blue deeps,

Questioning, which is fire,

Spangling night in glinting shoals

Of sidereal time, till the mind

Reels, besotted with splendour,

Questioning, which ignites the body,

Burns up every leaf of the mind,

Consumes the mind's roots, the heart,

In the smelter of spirit, till the soul

Pools, gleaming, breathing red gold,

Sky, all world, sky lights up,

Kindles with the coming sun,

Throws everything into unbearable relief,

We twist, maddened by the light

Of dawn, closing its disclosing

With departure, we stumble away,

Ever looking backwards to behold

The staggering Beauty for which

We were born belonging,

Any shadow will do,

Where we hope not to die of regret,

Because we forget just enough

To remember only sorrow, or better yet,

To feel nothing at all,

Than surrender to sky, star sky,

Grievous sky of radiant daybreak.

Is there one, is there anywhere

One Who will bend sky down, rend

Its awful vastness and descend,

The day reined in within His ardent 

Glance, His wounds the burning stars

Which cover me with constellations

Of compassion, and be, Himself

My firmament and friend?

--Gregory Elmer O.S.B, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, June 5, 1995, prayer found at St. Andrew's Abbey

Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant, 

corn kernel, dried bean, 

poke into loosened soil, 

cover over with measured fingertips 

These T-shirts we fold 

into perfect white squares 

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips 

This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl 

This bed whose covers I straighten 

smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown 

blanket 

and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address 

so the name balances like a cloud 

in the center of sky

This page I type and retype 

This table I dust till the scarred wood shines 

This bundle of clothes I wash and hang 

and wash again 

like flags we share, a country so close 

no one needs to name it 

The days are nouns: touch them 

The hands are churches that worship the world

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Palestinian-American poet, from Words Under Words: Selected Poems, 1995

Blessing for a Pregnant Woman

The following may be used either privately or at a public service.

 

O Lord and giver of life, receive our prayer for N. and for the child she has conceived, that they may happily come to the time of birth, and serving you in all things may rejoice in your loving providence. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

 

When appropriate, any or all of the following may be added:

Blessed are you, Lord God. You have blessed the union of N. and N. Amen.

Blessed are you, Lord God. May your blessing be upon N. and the child she carries. Amen. 

 

Blessed are you, Lord God. May this time of pregnancy be for N. and N. months of drawing nearer to you and to one another. Amen. 

 

Blessed are you, Lord God. May N. and N.’s experience of birth be full of awe and wonder and the joy of sharing in your creation. Amen. 

 

Blessed are you, Lord God. Let the fullness of your blessing be upon those whom we bless in your Name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

 

-- From the Book of Occasional Services, 2018, pp 139-140

Celtic Prayer for a Newborn

Lucky stars above you,

Sunshine on your way;

Many friends to love you,

Joy in work and play;

Laughter to outweigh each care,

In your heart a song;

And gladness waiting everywhere

All your whole life long.

-- Unknown

Blessing for a Child

May God protect you from every danger that you face.
May God give you the strength and courage to take failure, not as a measure of your worth, but as a chance for a new start.
May you care for the body that God has given you and thus be filled with health and wholeness.
May prosperity come your way, so that you are free from worry about food and drink, about home and shelter, but
may you never be so caught up in material things that you forget that the essence of life lies not in possessions or money but in love, and in God.
May you find the joy that is ever present in God's creation.
May you find fulfillment in whatever you choose to do.
May you use your talents to serve in the way that God intends you to, helping your fellow humans and walking in the light of God.
May you fully love and may you be fully loved.
May your happiness be unmarred by evil, spite, or maliciousness, either your own or someone else’s.
May your path be one of goodness -- leading to changes for the better in the lives of others.
May you be a source of light and inspiration to your family and friends, and maybe the same to you.
May God fill you with wisdom and grace, with virtue and knowledge, with patience and action, and with understanding and love.
May you be forever comforted by a strong and enduring faith in God, who created you and who sustains your life.


--Ms Elizabeth K. Camp, in Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, et al, eds, Women's Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing), 2000

XL Expectans Expectavi

The stone itself will soon be rolled away,

I wait in patience, all expectantly,

Firm on this rock above the miry clay



Where he has set me in his loving mercy.

I sing my psalm in Christ who sings in me,

A new song made in his Love’s mystery:



‘Your wondrous works all rise like wings in me

And lift my heart to praise. I hear your call,

The simple call of Love: Oh come to me,



Bring me no gifts, for I have made them all,

Just bring yourself, and open up your heart.

And so I come to you and bring you all,



All that I am and have been; joy and hurt,

Glory and shame, I bring you everything,

That you might make me whole in every part.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English poet, priest, musician, theologian, and songwriter, from his Psalm series

Scripture Reference: Psalm 40

The Calm

Our storm is past, and that storm’s tyrannous rage,

A stupid calm, but nothing it, doth ‘suage.
The fable is inverted, and far more
A block afflicts, now, than a stork before.
Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us;
In calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus.
As steady’as I can wish that my thoughts were,
Smooth as thy mistress’ glass, or what shines there,
The sea is now; and, as the isles which we
Seek, when we can move, our ships rooted be.
As water did in storms, now pitch runs out;
As lead, when a fir’d church becomes one spout.
And all our beauty, and our trim, decays,
Like courts removing, or like ended plays.
The fighting-place now seamen’s rags supply;
And all the tackling is a frippery.
No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.
Earth’s hollownesses, which the world’s lungs are,
Have no more wind than the upper vault of air.
We can nor lost friends nor sought foes recover,
But meteor-like, save that we move not, hover.
Only the calenture together draws
Dear friends, which meet dead in great fishes’ jaws;
And on the hatches, as on altars, lies
Each one, his own priest, and own sacrifice.
Who live, that miracle do multiply,
Where walkers in hot ovens do not die.
If in despite of these we swim, that hath
No more refreshing than our brimstone bath;
But from the sea into the ship we turn,
Like parboil’d wretches, on the coals to burn.
Like Bajazet encag’d, the shepherds’ scoff,
Or like slack-sinew’d Samson, his hair off,
Languish our ships. Now as a myriad
Of ants durst th’ emperor’s lov’d snake invade,
The crawling gallies, sea-gaols, finny chips,
Might brave our pinnaces, now bed-rid ships.
Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being belov’d and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out-push’d me first,
I lose my end; for here, as well as I,
A desperate may live, and a coward die.
Stag, dog, and all which from or towards flies,
Is paid with life or prey, or doing dies.
Fate grudges us all, and doth subtly lay
A scourge, ‘gainst which we all forget to pray.
He that at sea prays for more wind, as well
Under the poles may beg cold, heat in hell.
What are we then? How little more, alas,
Is man now, than before he was? He was
Nothing; for us, we are for nothing fit;
Chance, or ourselves, still disproportion it.
We have no power, no will, no sense; I lie,
I should not then thus feel this misery.

--John Donne (1572-1631), English priest, poet, and essayist

Scripture reference: Matthew 14:22-33, Proper 14A