Every week, our Education for Ministry seminar (EfM) begins class with a worship service. We are encouraged to be creative, so long as our liturgy hits the same marks as ones authorized in our prayer book.
I'd been reading about Mary Oliver's collection Devotions and made the jump to creating a liturgy that would be a sort of collage of pieces from her work. I read her collection Thirst when it was new during the weekend of my first vestry retreat, and blogged about it. That post A Doorway into Thanks is a perrennial hit, read now by thousands.
The ellipsis [...] marks my omissions from Oliver's text; two asterisks ** mark space breaks inserted for the purpose of group reading. Other spaces are Mary Oliver's own.
Opening from "Six Recognitions of the Lord" p. 26
I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.
Confession ibid
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body. When I first found you I was
filled with light, now the darkness grows
and it is filled with crooked things, bitter
and weak, each one bearing my name.
A Song of Praise from "Messenger" p.1 (adapted for responsive reading - response after each asterisk)
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird -- equal seekers of sweetness,*
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled mud.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?*
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished,[...]*
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,*
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
Homily "The Summer Day" from The House of Light (1992)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.**
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.**
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Prayers from "Praying" p. 37
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
Silence may follow. Worshipers are encouraged to speak their own petitions.
We sum up all our petitions in the words that our Lord Jesus Christ taught us, saying...
The Lord's Prayer
Collect to be selected from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer
Closing "Thirst" p. 69
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers whic, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.
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