Liturgical Vership Poetic Prayers For Congregational Use Throughout The Church Year

Gifts in Open Hands contains a wealth of multicultural liturgies, prayers, affirmations, blessings, and poetry by people from the global community. These beautifully written pieces can be used in worship and celebration of sacraments, sacred seasons, and all other occasions in the life of the church.

Worship leaders, this engaging collection of prayers will support your work of creating meaningful services that reflect the church year in our part of the world. Joy provides prayers for many different purposes: Gathering - Candle lighting - Thanksgiving - Intercession - Petition - Confession - Assurance - Illumination - Offering - Blessing - Commissioning. In Aotearoa New Zealand the church year begins in early summer, harvest comes during the fast of Lent, and we celebrate Easter not when life is emerging anew in a burst of spring flowering but when leaves are turning red and gold and falling to the ground. The prayers and poems in this collection have been arranged to reflect the cycle of the seasons as we experience them, and the church's feasts and fasts, and other commemorations, as they occur within those seasons. To lead a congregation in worship is both a great privilege and a great responsibility. Prayer is a vital part of public worship. Many of the prayers are responsive, giving congregation members an opportunity for more active involvement in the service. The poems for personal reflection are ideal for printing on the front cover of an order of service or within a church bulletin. Joy's hope is that this book will be a useful resource for worship leaders, providing just the right words when they need them, and that they, and others who happen to open these pages, may find within sparks of inspiration to ignite their own devotional creativity.

Even in a society as highly mobile as our own has become, change is unsettling, discomfiting. Like our ancestors in faith, we are more often than not on the journey, in the wilderness, seeking to know who we are as a people, and trying to comprehend the God who, we hope, is going up with us--wherever it is we end up going. The paths are not as familiar as they once were, and recognizable signposts are rare. It's easy to feel lost. The congregation I have now served in Miami, Florida, for nearly twenty years has, while remaining constant in size, changed faces, accents, and styles at a dizzying pace. People don't stay put anymore, and the folk who find their way to church these days are hungry for a home, longing for community, and hoping the God of their long-vanished, Sunday-school childhoods can find the way to their latest change of address. For this pastor and her congregation, the rooting of our common life and shared faith story in the fertile soil and the organic rhythms of the liturgical year has provided a permanent address that feels like home. Tuning My Heart is a collection of articles, sermons, and poetry based upon the movements of the liturgical calendar and shaped by one tropical congregation's life cycle as it seeks to bloom in the old, rich soil of the Christian tradition, and to flower in the exotically scented air of the vibrant, diverse city that is home.

Liturgy is the golden chore; the ineffable becomes as practical as a calendar or a loaf of bread. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man and briefly walks among us, Love itself incarnate in the life of faith. This generous collection--in both senses of spirit and breadth--uses the liturgical year to explore the many aspects of Christian belief. In a wide variety of voices, styles, and forms, Ordinary Time (the title is deeply ironic) includes themes from the most intimate examinations of conscience to some of the knottiest theological/philosophical questions. In tones ranging from comic/satiric to meditative to ecstatic--in characters as diverse as several apostles, three different Christmas shepherds, Mother Theresa, a retired Navy cook, and a lapsed Catholic celebrity on a TV talk show--these poems cover an extraordinary breadth of faith experience, without diminishing the struggles of faith. Like Mother Theresa in "Darkness," absence and doubt have their place: they move Incarnate grace deep enough even to meet suffering and death. The ritual year that winds from nativity to death to resurrection includes each member of the body of Christ. This collection provides one pilgrim experience in memorable detail.

In the church year, in prayer, in liturgy we find a comingling of time and eternity. Without leaving our experience of time, we somehow, mystically, enter into God’s eternity. And God, without leaving his eternity, has entered into our time. The poems in Liturgical Entanglements seek to engage with these strange realities. Starting with Advent, the sonnets in this collection look to both the human and the divine, everyday occurrences, and the spiritual realities that uphold all of reality. Read these poems as prayers and let them help you see the world around you in a new way.

Worlds of Common Prayer explores book-length poems based on the Anglican liturgical calendar written between 1827 and 1935. John Keble created a new type of English poetry when he wrote his poetic companion to the Book of Common Prayer, The Christian Year (1827), which went on to become the single bestselling book of poetry in the English century. Drawing off of recent scholarship on both secularization studies and nineteenth-century conceptions of time, Worlds of Common Prayer exposes the surprisingly radical potential of liturgical poetry. The detective novelist and poet Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of her desire to find a “brick” that could smash the order of clock time, and discovered one in the liturgy. For major authors as dissimilar as Christina Rossetti and T.S. Eliot, the Anglican liturgical calendar served as a means of dismantling industrial capitalism’s time clock, and thereby of destabilizing the secular world order as a whole.