Proper 7, Year B: Litany for Hearts Wide Open

June 15, 2021 Fran Pratt

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Here is my previous litany from 2018, Year B, Proper 7: Litany for the Desperate

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we are remembering. Re-membering. Putting the body of knowledge back together again. Becoming conscious members once again of a Community. We forget that we are part of the body of God. We forget that our true selves are “hidden with Christ in God.” And that DOESN’T MEAN that our true selves are hidden from us or inaccessible to us. It means we are enfolded in God, God being all around everywhere available. Waiting to be remembered.

(I’m using words to try to express a fairly profound spiritual truth, which is always tricky business.)

My point is: I’m thinking (and learning from many spiritual teachers) that it is our work here to re-member ourselves as parts of Christ/God on earth. And then to live out that essential truth in our thoughts, words, and actions.

And then Saint Paul speaks so beautifully about the paradoxes we are muddling through here on earth, and how we are learning to recognize our true selves among all this contrast. He says: “Our hearts are wide open.” Which I take as a shorthand way of expressing that our hearts are mirroring God’s heart as part of God’s heart. We assume the wide-open-hearted posture of God toward all beings, toward ourselves, toward each other. When we can do this, we’ve come home to our true nature and the world will reverberate with our home-coming.

God, we are here in this realm of contrast, relativity, and duality,
Learning to recognize ourselves -
You in us, us in you.
You flung open your heart to us!

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Proper 6 (Year B): Litany for Perceiving Beyond Appearance

June 8, 2021 Fran Pratt

As I read through this week’s Lectionary passages, I’m reflecting on God’s advice to Samuel as he has to pick yet another king for the fractious Hebrew nation, after Saul’s kingship turns disastrous: "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7).

This theme of perceiving beyond appearance is reinforced in the Ezekiel: “I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree…” and in the 2 Corinthians: “we regard no one from a human point of view”. And finally it’s there in the words of Christ in Mark 4 regarding the Mustard Seed: “smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs…”

Jesus says in the beatitudes: don’t judge. These texts bring us back to that non-judgement, that call to humility. Remember: you have no idea what you’re looking at. You have no idea the true nature of the person you’re talking to, beyond the fact that they are innately beloved and part of the Imago Dei. You have no idea what this seed can become. You have no idea what diamonds lie behind these wounds.

God, we look at tiny seeds,
Which appear insignificant, easily lost,
With no notion of the potential they hold, or what they might become,
Given the right nurturing:
Soil, water, sunlight,
A recipe for greatness (1).

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Proper 5 (Year B): Litany for Non-Hierarchy

June 2, 2021 Fran Pratt

Human societies are addicted to hierarchies. At least, that’s my theory. This First Testament story from 1 Samuel illustrates my point.

For about 300 years after the time of Joshua, after the Exodus and desert wandering, the Hebrew people had been governed by an amorphous group of leaders - Judges, functioning as ad hoc mediators and elders. More guiding the nation than ruling it. No centralized government. No conglomerated power. A communal effort. Plus there were the priests and Samuel the prophet, trying to listen to God.

The people hate it. At least the loud ones do. (Personally, I wonder what the mothers thought…?) And beg Samuel the Prophet/Priest to find them a king. They want a ruler to bring glory and prosperity and victory to them. They want to be like other respectable “kingdoms.”

God says to Samuel: you may as well listen to them because they aren’t going to let me lead them. So Samuel warns them in no uncertain terms: this way lies empire, war, toil, loss, oppression, slavery. Yes, we want this, they say. So Samuel, resigned, agrees to “renew the kingship.” And Saul is appointed King over Israel.

Of course, Samuel was right. Hierarchy begets oppression. It did then, and it does to this day.

We also get the account from Genesis of the first shame. Adam and Eve in the garden, found out for eating forbidden fruit, experiencing shame for the first time. I read this story all kinds of ways. Today I think: What if the knowledge was knowledge of hierarchy? Hierarchy begets shame.

And then, in the gospel text from Mark 3, Jesus says: here are my mother and brothers. Pointing at… everybody. No hierarchy of relationship. No one person having more access to God’s goodness than any other.

God, our minds are being opened to the ways we are harmed by hierarchal systems.
We see this in the scripture stories (1),
We see this in our family histories,
And we see it at work in our societies:
When a few people are at the top,
A lot of people are always at the bottom…

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Pentecost Year B (2021): Litany for Sighs Too Deep For Words

May 18, 2021 Fran Pratt

The texts for the Day of Pentecost are rich with imagery, metaphor, and narrative. There is a persistent theme of “now and not yet” - the work is complete but has yet to be fully revealed. The Spirit is available but we have yet to harness it’s full power. The earth dwells in perfection but yearns for the day when all creatures are truly free in body.

The story of Pentecost in Acts is powerful and curious, a story of equality and inclusion, of accessibility, simplicity, and choice. In Acts 2 the Apostle Peter quotes the Prophet Joel’s inclusive and egalitarian vision of God’s Kin-dom, saying “'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

Everyone who wants in is in, status notwithstanding.

From Resurrection to Pentecost we leap from awakening to consciousness, from believing to seeing. I’ve tried to do the practically-impossible here: to capture our collective wordless longing in words.This litany accompanies the text, drawing from the Ezekiel, Acts, and Romans passages.

God, we are waiting, waiting,
For the redemption of these physical bodies (1);
Even as we know they are already redeemed,
Still we wait for the fullness of time.

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Easter 7, Year B (2021): Litany for Straddling the Worlds

May 10, 2021 Fran Pratt

In this week's text from John 17, Jesus is praying for his people. The reading seems like he's praying for his own specific group with whom he's spent the last several years leading up to the crucifixion. But we receive this insider glimpse into his mind - how he thinks about these people he loves, the responsibility he feels for their growth and well-being. This prayer is pastoral, but it's also... familial. Like, brotherly: 'listen pops I tried really hard to keep the kids out of trouble...'

There's also an aspect of it that feels sortof like a personal pep-talk - Jesus knows what's coming will be hard, but he's come this far and he's gearing up for the next phase, cataloguing his successes and mourning his losses (Judas). He leans hard on themes of unity, Oneness, and of belonging, not to paradigms of the world but to the paradigm of Heaven.

I find myself in deep gratitude for this peek into the cry of Jesus’ heart today; how human it is, how vulnerable. We see him, not as a victor (yet), but as a human person on the cusp of literal crucible. I resonate with this Jesus, and I love him - the one who goes to suffering with his beloveds on his mind. And I like to think that when he prayed for them he prayed for me.

Also, I’m seeing how Jesus is praying them right into a new world, a new way of being. And I echo those prayers for protection, for help, for Oneness, for living with one foot in heaven and the other navigating life on earth, straddling two worlds.

God, as Jesus prays for his group of beloved friends,
We pray for ourselves and each other:
Protect us, God (1);
Bring us to an understanding of Oneness;
Make our joy complete (2);
Fill us with truth (3)….

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Easter 6, Year B (2021): Litany for Minding Our Own Business

May 5, 2021 Fran Pratt

This litany draws from this week's Lectionary. Here is the one from 2018 if you care to use it.

A major lesson for me over the last few years has been around themes of minding my own business, managing my mind, and refraining from trying to "fix" or change other people. I am the only person whose mind I can change. My job is to do my own spiritual work and the work that the Spirit puts before me to do. My job is to love unconditionally and to forgive everything. By healing myself I heal the world.

This is both liberating AND a hard habit to break. Especially if, like me, you were raised to engage in Christian culture wars, to "win" (arguments, victories, souls, etc.), to be right and righteous, to "defend the faith." But the more I look at the life of Jesus, and listen to the promptings of the Spirit within me, the more deeply I understand the non-defensive, non-judgmental posture of the Christ. I think of him referring to the Pharisees as "white-washed tombs," so focused on the behaviors of other people and disregarding the state of their own hearts. He went to a whole death non-defensively, and got up preaching peace and forgiveness. Imagine it.

God, everything you give,
You give freely.
You make room for everyone who wants into your community,
Everyone who wants to abide in love …

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Easter 4, Year B (2021): Litany for Love in Action

April 20, 2021 Fran Pratt

Here is the litany I wrote for the last cycle, Year B, Easter Week 4: Litany for the Good Shepherd

For Easter Week 4 Year B in 2018, my litany focused on John 10, the “I am the Good Shepherd” passage. This year I’m leaning on the Lectionary Epistle, 1 John 3.

God, we know that if we say we love you
And neglect to love our neighbors,
Our words are empty
And our faith is practically useless …

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Easter 3, (Year B 2021): Litany for Peace Be With You

April 13, 2021 Fran Pratt

I find that, occasionally, it makes sense to offer a prayer or liturgy with a simple refrain. It offers a place to mentally land for a few moments, especially in a litany dealing with heavy topics. This week, given the news, feels like one of those weeks. Also, sometimes we need to say a thing aloud a bunch of times to get it into our thick skulls :)

Sunday I preached a sermon about inner peace being an inside job and a choice that we get to make out of our free will about whether to take Christ up on the invitation into let "Peace be with you" regardless of what's happening around us.

And then we are confronted with news of more killings, more injustice, more police violence. (RIP Duante Wright, Lord have mercy.)

I even got news from my best friend that she is suddenly in hospital having emergency surgery.

Bad news is another opportunity for me to practice this lesson. To practice the Peace Within (John 20: 19) regardless of how the world, events, other people, etc are behaving or feeling.

I'm reminded of the hymn lyrics: "Thou wilt keep [them] in perfect peace / whose mind is stayed on Thee."

And I'm convinced that keeping that inner peace fire stoked, we are able to access more empathy, more compassion, and more right action. When we are not spinning our wheels in worry, anxiety, and emotional turbulence (here is the growth edge for me) we are better problem solvers and justice-doers. Today I'm even more sure that Inner Peace is an important Fulcrum of Transformation.

This is difficult spiritual work. Inner peace is not apathy. It's a radical restructuring of our way of being in the world.

We hear the voice of Christ speaking:
Peace be with you (1).
Right now these words seem impossible, mind-boggling,
Even, at times, annoying….

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Easter 2 (Year B 2021): Litany for Our Mission

April 6, 2021 Fran Pratt

Helloooooo! This is me, back in real time after my Lenten rest. Thank you all for your prayers, and thanks and welcome to new patrons who have come on board during that time. I offer this litany today with renewed strength.

This week’s Lectionary gospel selection is one of my absolute favorites in scripture, second only to the Beatitudes. In John 20, Jesus, freshly risen from a tomb preceded by unimaginable trauma, speaks some of the most revolutionary and radical ideas of his career. I rarely preach a sermon or give a talk without mentioning them. In fact, I was assigned this weekend to preach at my church and when I discovered that this was the text I got a shiver of rightness. I honestly can’t get over this account of Jesus’ statements.

He does 3 radical, amazing, mind-bending things in this passage:

1) He speaks peace, like a magic word, like a balm, like a miracle, to the disciples as they cower in fear in a locked room. “Peace be with you” he says. Which is even more crazy when you consider all the things he did NOT say in this moment. Wow.

2) He breathes on them saying, “receive the holy spirit.” What? Just like that? Breathe it in? It was right here all along like the air? Whoooooosh and there you have it. Everything you ever needed.

3) He tells them that if they “forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” …. Wait like, us? Like we are the ones who have this power? Not just you, not just God?

In this moment, the disciples are given access to all the power in the world: the power of peace, the power of the Spirit, and the power of forgiveness. This moment tells me everything I need to know about how to live a life of following Jesus and what I am to embody and spread: peace, spriit, forgiveness. Three fulcrums of transformation. And they are presented so briefly here that we might miss them if we aren’t looking for them.

Look, go back and read and contemplate it. I hope it will give you chills like it gives me every time.

God we lay hold of the power you have shared with us
The Peace Christ speaks out over us
The Spirit Christ breathes upon us
The Forgiveness Christ invites us to spread ….

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Easter Year B 2021: Litany for Easter People

March 30, 2021 Fran Pratt

Just as we have been finding some solace and acceptance of the cycles of nature, of death > burial > resurrection during Lent, it strikes me that we must also acknowledge what has been completed - those cycles we need no longer participate in if we believe that the Christ completed them fully in his work here on the earth in the Resurrection.

I’m thinking here of cycles of shame perpetuating harm, trauma perpetuating violence, detrimental self-sacrifice perpetuating disempowerment, and the like.

In particular, I and so many people raised in a similar religious paradigm as I was, were taught that self-sacrifice and service to others was *the way* to live righteously; and I have witnessed the harmful fruit of that teaching in my own life and others’. Many of us sacrificed and served ourselves right out of any authentic identity or empowerment, self-confidence or self-esteem. Especially if we were women.

If we believe that Jesus came to love humanity, aren’t we part of humanity too, and deserving of that love? If we believe that Jesus came to offer “salvation” to humanity (however you interpret that - there are so many ways), aren’t you and I part of that humanity in receipt of salvation? If we believe that Jesus made the “ultimate sacrifice” why do we keep on thinking we need to do more sacrificing? If that work is complete, why do we not live as though it is?

Notice I’m offering questions. Not answers. This is where my head is as I ponder this week’s account of the resurrection of Christ, and as I enter into this more celebratory and joyful season, seeking to integrate the lessons of Lent along with the hope and joy of resurrection.

God, we are witnesses of what Christ has done (1)

Empowered by the Holy Spirit,

He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed (2);

And You, God, were with him in every moment.

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Palm Sunday, Year B (2021): Litany for the Humble Way

March 23, 2021 Fran Pratt

In Jesus, all of our ideas about glory, royalty, exclusivity, and honor get up-ended. People project all kinds of notions onto him, and he just proceeds with his work healing and preaching his message.

One minute (in last week’s text) he’s talking about how it's time for him to be “glorified” - when what he means is not exactly our ideal glory: death. As opposed to, say, winning military battles or wearing fancy priest robes. And the next minute (in this week’s Palm Sunday text) he’s playing the people’s game, riding into the city on an unbroke donkey. I can imagine him sortof shrugging like, “guess we’re doing this now.”

See, based on his actions here I don’t get the idea that he feels like he needs to be worshipped. He’s trailed by a crowd due to the fact that he’s just raised Lazarus from the dead* but he’s not letting it go to his head or calling attention to himself. He chooses the most lowly of pack animals. He seems happy with paltry palm fronds for offerings. His ego doesn’t require trumpets. He’s the most willing to get down and dirty with lonely and sick people in the streets and byways. I hear his main message as “God’s community is right here for you to join up with” and not “worship me I’m the king of the world.”

And I wonder how often we are getting this wrong: thinking Jesus needs to be put on a pedestal and worshipped rather than learned from and followed. I wonder how often we are that crowd, projecting our need for a loud and rowdy to-do onto Jesus, rather than plugging into the new way of being that he’s embodying and trying to help us wake up to.

God, we witness Christ in the scriptures
Embodying healing love,
Preaching the nearness of God,
Walking along the Path of Peace….

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Lent 5, Year B 2021: Litany for Embracing Change

March 16, 2021 Fran Pratt

In this week’s gospel text from John 12, Jesus shares the metaphor of the seed undergoing burial in the ground and death - death of its season of existence as a seed - so that it might become the “glorified” version of itself: the full grown wheat plant that bears fruit for nourishment. The “fruit” being more wheat seeds, and so the cycle continues. The wheat is continually undergoing transformation from one state of being to another: seed, sprout, seedling, mature plant, seed..

Jesus says that he must pass through this similar experience, which he then allows his physical body to undergo: the “seed” of his physical body, he says, must be buried so that it can be transformed into a more glorious state and make way for more cycles. He tells us that this is the nature of things on earth: change, transformation, cycles, rhythms. To resist this is to resist life, and he says as much in verse 25: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

We participate in eternity by our non-resistant participation in these divine rhythms. We become immortal by not resisting death. What a paradox, hey!

The Psalmist prays to be changed - to be cleansed, washed, purged, transformed, and to be made more fundamentally joyful (Psalm 51:7,8). They pray for their old patterns to die and be replaced: “Create in me a clean heart, and put a new and right spirit within me.”

Lent is our opportunity to create the intention of embracing the death that is naturally part of change and transformation. By embracing change, we embrace death, and by embracing death we embrace life.

God, we behold the cycles of nature,
Understanding that change is the constant -
The release of the old to make way for the new,
The acceptance of death to make way for new life….

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Lent 4, Year B 2021: Litany for Alignment with Christ

March 9, 2021 Fran Pratt

In Jesus’ late-night conversation with Nicodemus we receive John’s famous (and much-romanticized (1) ) remembrance of Jesus’ words: “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” They beg the question: what does it mean to “believe in him”?

Professor Samuel Cruz of UTS says this:

“ It is therefore necessary to ask some pertinent questions of him and/or this gospel lesson: What does believing in him (Jesus) mean? Why did Jesus need to come into the world? Was it because of sin? If indeed Jesus came to the world to save it from sin, what kind of sin? For John, sin seems to be concrete and structural (that is injustice, hate, lack of mercy, etc.) rather than individualistic….Therefore, for John, believing in Jesus has more to do with what people believe regarding evil, hate, exploitation, and injustice rather an esoteric “religious” conversion.”

I have left writing this installment of this year’s lent series until last, precisely because this verse, over-simplified and over-romanticized, gives such trouble to the modern reader, especially one who has begun any sort of deconstruction from dogmatic or superficial theological interpretation. But Professor Cruz’s words give me hope that we might be able to figure out what it means to truly believe in Christ, to align ourselves with his values, to take up his mission and purpose, to accept his invitation into a new way of being in the world that then becomes ours too. Hope that we might be able, in Western Christianity, to go beyond a flippant or surface-level reading of this passage and allow it to lead us to our true selves, re-creating the world as we go.

God, here in this Lenten season, we slough off all that distracts us,
All that doesn’t serve heaven’s cause,
All that is not aligned with the highest good,
All that keeps us from becoming our truest selves:
Inheritors of the riches of God’s grace,
Adopted and beloved siblings with Christ…

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Lent 3, Year B 2021: Litany for the Inner Sanctuary

March 2, 2021 Fran Pratt

When Christ turned over the tables of the sellers and money-changers in the temple, he declared that productivity culture has no business in the inner sanctuary of God. God is not about consumption or production. The inner life is a closed-loop: we are divinely resourced and divinely Allowed. We can turn our attention away from pressure to Do, and Produce, and toward the opportunity to Rest, Be, Dwell. There is nothing to prove, nothing to win, nothing to achieve, nothing to earn. All we need has been achieved for us. Cycles of sacrifice ended with Christ’s work - he completed them and we no longer need to play them out.

This theme also comes to us in the Exodus passage. The people are instructed to observe a Sabbath, to remember it, and “keep it holy.” One day out of every seven is reserved for rest and resistance to productivity culture, resistance to exhaustion, to remind them (and us) that our worth is not our work. Even resting, accomplishing nothing, producing nothing, only receiving and allowing, we are worthy, beloved, whole.

This doesn’t mean we don’t participate in economies and systems while we are here on earth. It means we don’t identify ourselves with them. They are not us. Our work, our doing, is not us. And it means that the Inner Sanctuary is always available to us - the place of rest and peace, of acceptance and being.

God, we feel the pull of the Inner Sanctuary
We are drawn in by your love and beauty,
Into the welcome and peace of Spirit.
The true temple, the dwelling place of God, is within us …

Lent 2, Year B 2021: Litany for Lenten Cycles

February 23, 2021 Fran Pratt

I’m a firm believer that Lent, practiced consciously, is a guardrail against spiritual bypassing. The regular observance of seasons of austerity, lament, and penance, which we Christians get in Lent and Advent, guide us to enter into aspects of the human experience we’d rather not endure.

Other spiritual traditions have similar seasons: Jews have Yom Kippur; Muslims have Ramadan; Hindus have Navaratri; and so forth. These rhythms keep us pain-avoidant human beings honest: they take us into the shadow so that we have an opportunity to alchemize - or if you prefer a Christianese word: redeem - what we find there: the uncomfortable feelings, the limiting beliefs, patterns of harm, the losses we didn’t have time to grieve, traumas we didn’t have resources to heal before. These seasons offer us the opportunity to make meaning of the human condition and to accept it as it is, to accept ourselves as we are. In Lent we are invited to stop judging our pain and instead feel it and allow it to teach us. It is part of a cycle: we don’t stay in Lent forever. Death comes, and then Resurrection. Weeping comes in the soul’s night, then joy in the morning. We sow in tears, we reap in joy. If we never accept the rhythm of sowing in tears, we have little appreciation, much less gratitude, for joy. We know light by its contrast to darkness.

In Western culture we make very little space for weakness, pain, mourning, lament, sadness. We are taught early on that excessive feeling that doesn’t fall in the category of anger or excitement is unwelcome, and that sadness is a pathology. But the rhythms of the Christian faith tradition offer a different paradigm: one that welcomes the mourner, blesses the weak, and gives space and voice to lament. It assigns value to loneliness and suffering even as it assures us that we are never alone in suffering.

Jesus heading out to the desert wilderness for a period of solitude and austerity sets the precedent for Lenten practice. Jesus accepts all parts of human experience, entering into the full spectrum of emotion. He rejects no parts of the whole.

In week 2 of Lent, Year B, we are invited along with the disciples to “deny” ourselves, take up the instrument of our suffering, and follow him into the totality of embodied adventure, and to do this willingly, without judgement or resistance, trusting that the way out is the way through.

God, our culture teaches us to avoid pain, And to suppress emotion; But in the wisdom tradition that Christ practiced, We find space for pain, emotion, and much more.

Lent 1, Year B, 2021: Litany for the Wilderness

February 16, 2021 Fran Pratt

Oh! Here’s the Baptism account I was telling you about last week! Right here for us all to contemplate again. Jesus is baptized, then heads out to the desert to take care of some inner work. There aren’t but 2 sentences dedicated to Mark’s description of Jesus going to the desert. Matthew and Luke give Jesus in the desert more airtime, noting that he fasted and prayed in the desert, but Mark only stresses the point that he was tempted by Satan and cared for by angels. John (the non-synoptic one) doesn’t mention any of this at all.

(Aside: So, 2 out of 4 gospels give us THE WHOLE SEASON OF LENT? I find this funny; you’d think all four gospels would need to agree in order to justify creating a *whole liturgical season.*)

The Catholic Vatican Council II identifies two central elements of the season of Lent:

Baptism: either recalling it or preparing to undergo it
Penance

In other words the spirit of the season, as they imagine it, is that it is an extended ritual of purification and preparation. Which, as I mentioned last week, all wisdom traditions (that I know of) contain.

We wash ourselves, and then we let the desert dry us off. That arid, sandy ground; empty, nowhere for longing to hide. So dry and desperate it cracks open.

Jesus went out to the desert wilderness; but in my experience, the desert often comes to us. And the desert is what has my attention just now. I am thinking of that solitary expanse. The harshness of it, but also the beauty. I am thinking of how resonant Jesus’ expedition there is to me just now; Mark says the “Spirit drove him” there (NRSV). I am thinking of the circumstances in my own life that drive me to someplace bleak and essential, where the only thing for me to focus on is my own longing, my own thirst. And where I must overcome the temptation to resort to *any old thing* to relieve me of the discomfort of existing there.

When the waters of my baptism have evaporated off me, I recall them with yearning. Yet. When I’m dry as dust, and I am distilled down to my essence, there comes an opportunity for new clarity. The desert can teach me why I’m on this journey anyway.

And here is our invitation: to accept the desert. To not go the long way ‘round. To experience it and feel it - the hunger and the cold and the scorching sun and the desperate thirst - and allow it to show us who we are, and to prepare us for the real work we are here to do.

God, as Christ goes out into the wilderness
To experience solitude
To refrain from distraction,
To be tempted to escape discomfort;
So we find ourselves, at times, in a similar place:
Whether we chose to go there or not….

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Epiphany 6, Transfiguration, Year B (2021): Litany for our Highest Spiritual Selves

February 9, 2021 Fran Pratt

Here is the litany for Transfiguration Sunday, Year B, which I wrote in 2018. I still like it a lot.

I looked up the dictionary definition of transfiguration: "a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state" (citation). Over the years I've come to interpret most of the actions and experiences of Christ as invitations. E.g. Jesus resurrects; we are invited into resurrection. Jesus is embodied; we are invited to embrace our embodiment. Jesus heals; we are invited into healing. Jesus is baptized; we are invited into baptism. Jesus undergoes transfiguration; we are invited to undergo transfiguration, etc.

Speaking of baptism, I've also come to understand baptism as a precursor to the transfiguration; almost as though baptism is a ritual signaling our consent to the ongoing process of transfiguration. Every culture has its rituals of symbolic purification in preparation for transformation and higher spiritual awareness. I had never noticed this connection until I started learning more about other spiritual traditions.

This week's gospel text comes from Mark 9. Jesus's baptism is recounted in Mark 1. The life of Christ is full of these kinds of symbols, laced with layers of meaning. Embodiment > purification > transfiguration > death > resurrection > ascension. They are both actual and symbolic, inviting us to perceive our own lives in this multidimensional way.

And here we are at Lent's doorway, with this opportunity to ask ourselves: What rituals of purification do I need to engage in to prepare for and give consent to a higher way of being, a personal transfiguration?

Lent: a time of fasting, preparation, re-focusing. It begins, in the church calendar, with this picture, the example, of what we, too, are to become: the image of Christ shining gloriously, full of embodied light. He is fully become; he is his own true self - even before Good Friday. Even before resurrection. He even tells the disciples that they don’t have to die physically in order to see the kingdom of God come in power (Mark 9:1)! And we are invited to follow that path toward “a complete change of form...into a more spiritual state,” even as we live these homely, challenging lives here on earth.

God, we celebrate the transfiguration of Christ -
Christ, shining gloriously with heaven’s light,
Embodying his True Self, even while on earth.
He is fully Become, fully realized.

Epiphany 5: Litany for Healing and Renewal

February 2, 2021 Fran Pratt

In light of my own state of exhaustion, and the exhausting times we have endured together, I offer this prayer based on this week’s Lectionary selections.

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Yahweh is the everlasting God,
The Creator of the ends of the earth (1)
Yet, in our weariness, we often forget
The lovingkindness of Spirit to us when we falter. …

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Epiphany 4, Year B (2021): Litany for Caring for Each Other

January 28, 2021 Fran Pratt

Here is this week's litany from 2018: Litany for Unclean Spirits, which focuses on the text from Mark 1 in which Christ casts out the unclean spirit in Capernaum.

This time around, I'm dealing primarily with the text of 1 Corinthians 8, in which Saint Paul discusses what was apparently an issue: whether or not to eat food sacrificed to idols. He points out that all things have their existence in God as represented by Christ: “through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Rather than splitting hairs about doctrine and correctness, he invites the Corinthian church to see all their decisions and actions first through a lens of love for others, urging them to “ take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

We too are invited into this tension: we live in liberation from dogma, yet we can choose to center our right action in Love for Neighbor. This litany leans into those themes.

God, you have given all things to us,
Things in heaven and things on earth;
Placed the land under our stewardship,
And the people under one another’s mutual care…

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Epiphany 3 (Year B, 2021): Litany for a New Day

January 21, 2021 Fran Pratt

In Jonah 3, a group of people turn from idolatrous and evil ways, repenting (turning away from) their old, exploitative ways.

Psalm 62 exhorts us to look to God - not to any earthly thing. Not to riches or wealth. Not to powerful people. To the Divine Within.

In Mark 1, John the Baptist is arrested and imprisoned. Jesus is assembling a group of followers - disciples, they’re called. His unifying message is: the Kingdom of God is near! Repent!... In other words: Turn away from your old ways of thinking about success, about victory, about what is really happening, and what is really important in the world; and believe instead in the good news of God - that all divine resources are yours for the taking, that the commonwealth of heaven is a place where you and every other person belongs. Re-wire your brain with the understanding that all are one, all are Beloved, all are welcome, and all are forgiven for whatever they did before they understood that.

I write this litany immediately following the inauguration of the new president and vice-president of the US. We (some of us) in the US are tentatively hopeful, anxiously expectant. It is a moment in which we have the opportunity to listen to this week’s scriptures in an open-minded way - to hear of the Ninevites repentance, the Psalmic call to trust in God and not in economies or rulers, and the invitation of Christ to turn our attention to the Kingdom of God, which is near at hand and available to us as we move forward, working for change. I hope this prayer inspires and offers some hope. . .