Liturgies

GATHERING

ENTRANCE

REFLECTION

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p xiii

GATHERING

ENTRANCE

REFLECTION

We are the vessels of God’s voice, her words blowing through us, bidding us to tell the tales that only we can speak.

Jan L. Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path

GATHERING

ENTRANCE

REFLECTION

Being in the world and loving one another…exposes us to wounding, to the giving and receiving of pain. Christ’s wounds … underscore the depth of his willingness to enter into our loving in all its hurt and hope and capacity for going horribly wrong. In wearing his wounds—even in his resurrection—he confronts us with our own and calls us to move through them into new life.

Jan Richardson, “Easter 2: The Illuminated Wound” at http://paintedprayerbook.com/2011/04/24/easter-2-the-illuminated-wound/

GATHERING

ENTRANCE

REFLECTION

In the Empire of God, the means to life are offered to all freely, as a gift, regardless of what has been earned.

The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning
Stephen J. Patterson, p. 145

GATHERING

ENTRANCE

REFLECTION

We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that [God] should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at [God’s] love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.

Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out, p. 102