Lift Up Your Hearts

This hymnal supports the full range of actions in worship. It is designed to serve those involved with group singing, worship planning, praise teams and choirs, choral conductors, personal and family devotions, pastoral care, and small groups. In addition to hymns and psalms, the second half of the hymnal includes prayers, litanies and liturgies.

Winner of a 2018 Catholic Press Association Award: First-Time Author, Spirituality Softcover (First Place) and a 2018 Association of Catholic Publishers Award: Inspirational (Second Place). For more than four-hundred years, Introduction to the Devout Life by Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales has been regarded as the essential guide to holiness and loving God. This spiritual classic takes on new life in Lift Up Your Heart, where Rev. John Burns has interpreted ten meditations for the modern reader and distilled them into a ten-day mini-retreat that can easily be completed in the midst of a busy life. This practical book goes right to the heart of helping you kick the habit of floating along on your spiritual journey to start actively pursuing holiness and devotion to God. During the course of the retreat, you'll learn the basics of forming a daily prayer routine, including how to offer yourself to God, meditate on his love, and maintain peace in the face of suffering and clarity in the midst of temptation. The meditations will help you: Adopt gratitude as a daily prayer practice. Examine and reorder your priorities and relationships to better reflect your love for God. Discern between good and evil in your life. Desire to love and serve as Jesus did. In a very real sense, Burns helps you take St. Francis de Sales as your spiritual director for ten days. As you do so, you’ll feel God’s fatherly love and restart your faith life, equipped with the tools to connect with God and live for heaven now.

These 50 blessings and services include opening and closing prayers, a Scripture reading, time for reflection on the word and intercessions. There are blessings for committees, catechumens, planning teams, eucharistic ministers, lectors, choir members, altar servers, for stewardship and evangelization, and for multicultural parishes. There are church year services for Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time and ten prayers for overall parish meetings and gatherings.

Lift Up Your Heartsis an exciting hymnal for congregations wanting to introduce contemporary music into worship. It contains more than 140 popular and easy-to-sing hymns, including songs of praise and thanksgiving, prayer and mission, and responses for use in the service for the Lord's Day. This Pew Edition includes words, melody line and guitar chords for each hymn.

This homiletics team concludes their series with homilies/reflections for Cycle C. At the end of each homily are two sets of questions: one for the general reader for (private or group) reflection and one specifically for preachers that suggests "other directions for preaching."