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Inspiration for this litany is drawn from the texts for the 2nd Sunday after Christmas, Year C.
God, we are becoming more mature,
More capacious in our inward hearts,
Able to bear witness to our hardships and sorrow,
But still keep hold of gratitude and joy.
We know that a great deal of inner space and nuance is required,
If we want to be happy and healthy in these times.
Here is the litany for the first Sunday after Christmas, Year C. This year that falls on 12/26/21. In the texts for this day, we witness the young Jesus having completely forgotten his family and responsibilities, he's so caught up in seeking and reveling in wisdom at the temple. May we seek wisdom and connection with the Divine with such single-mindedness.
I hope to have Christmas 2, as well as a New Year's prayer for you all by early next week. Cheers!
God, in this Christmas season we turn our hearts and minds to your great love
Which is demonstrated in the person of Christ:
A powerful force for transformation in the world,
Available and freely given to us all.
Y’all, I couldn’t decide which Lectionary Proper to focus on for this litany, so I drew from all 3! Hence the more-than-usual number of citations.
The final (not penultimate, just the last left to discuss here. Some of us have to repeat stages here and there, hello) stage of grief is Acceptance. In acceptance we, at least temporarily, move into a place of non-resistance to our reality, and from here we find that we can actually function, do some good, find some relief, move forward with building a life in the New Normal.
And what’s the New Normal that Christ points us to? Now that we have done all this preparation in Advent; now that we’ve let ourselves feel sorrow and grief, and taken a hard look at our world and our own responses to it? How will we live now?
What we longed for has arrived. With the arrival of Christ - this cohesive force, gathering up all the world's suffering and pronouncing it No Longer Necessary; showing us a different way to be in the world, new structures and systems available for imaginative people - we are looking at a New Normal.
So the question for us is: Will we live in the New Normal that Christ points out for us? Or will we revert back to living in our old ways, our old harmful structures, re-living our pain and trauma in a loop? Will the Word, as John calls the Christ, become flesh among us? And will we enter into the joy, gladness, and gratitude offered to us in the world that Christ envisions and embodies?
I hope we will. Merry Christmas, friends.
God, at times we become so identified with our pain
That we can’t even imagine a different experience.
We hold onto trauma and suffering like a life-raft,
Thinking it will take us somewhere we haven’t been before.
In Mary’s Magnificat we hear the voice of a young prophet - not only is Mary a woman, but she is YOUNG - and yet she demonstrates a deep understanding of the plight of her people, and of herself as part of that people. And, even more remarkably to me today, her expression is uttered to her cousin Elizabeth. One of the most radical and often suppressed songs of resistance ever recorded by humans is spoken by a young woman to an older woman.
I especially love how she speaks in present tense: God has filled the hungry. God has shown strength. Here and now, God has done this. She is sure, even though she can’t see all the evidence. This is the Advent posture.
So I’m thinking of the Magnificat this week alongside my own feelings and observations of holiday futility - obligatory shopping and gift-giving, obligatory visits with family we may or may not enjoy, the ongoing pandemic and worsening environmental crisis, wealth disparity and racial inequity, and on and on. They want me to think about hope, peace, joy, and love NOW? Even though I can’t see the evidence?
It’s not a far leap for me, in light of the plight of my own people, from love to depression - the 4th stage of grief according to Dr. Kessler and Dr. Kubler-Ross. It occurs to me that I wouldn’t feel such grief for the world if I did not love it. I wouldn’t experience the low feelings of depression if they had no contrast with the heights of love. It’s almost as if depression, with its cynical but fairly (overly?) realistic take on things as they are, invites me into more love. Love in spite of. Love bearing witness to. Love wide open. Love loving everything, here and now.
People tell us: love is risky. Love opens us to the pain of loss. They say: grief is love with nowhere to go.* I mostly think they’re right. Love has polarity, like every unified thing in existence. And it seems grief, specifically depression, can be a very Advent-y pathway to perceiving that whole.
God, many of us experience melancholy, even despair.
We know what it's like to feel overwhelmed by sadness at times.
Some of us are lifelong companions of depression.
We empathize with the misery we witness in the world.
For this week’s litany I’m thinking of the texts, in which we are exhorted to BE JOYFUL! Because God is saving the day. God is rescuing, healing, restoring, setting-right. But I’m also thinking about Bargaining, the third stage of grief, as proposed by Dr Kessler and Dr. Kubler-Ross. For more on why I’m juxtaposing these two lenses on Advent, please go back and read my introduction to Advent Week 1.
In the Bargaining phase, our sorrow-stricken minds fight against reality. We cannot accept the state of things, so in our distress, the ego puffs up. It tells us that we can change this, we can fix it; it insists that this is not the way things will be and we’ll use whatever means necessary to remedy it. We bargain - possessions, behaviors, money, priorities, whatever we have at hand - in the futile hope that we can make a deal with the Powers That Be that will change their mind. Perhaps I can give up this bad habit and God will relent? Perhaps I can perform this act of service and the mind of the Universe will be changed? We try to force things to be the way we want them to be.
This is different from Denial. Denial cannot look reality in the face. Bargaining observes it and insists that it can be controlled. In the Bargaining phase, we believe we can trade something of ours for a different outcome. Advent is traditionally considered a penitential season. Our tendency toward bargaining slips in when we imagine that we might use the penitential season for our own ends.
I think we all get lost in this Bargaining phase now and again. Hopefully we pass through it sooner than later. I see whole swaths of church culture that are based in a prosperity gospel ego ponzi scheme of bargaining.
But real joy doesn’t come by force. It has no strings attached. In my experience, it comes to me by way of my awareness: I wake up to it - it was there all along. I was just too distracted to see it before. I must cultivate my awareness so that I can flow with joy.
Where bargaining forces, joy allows. Where bargaining tightens, joy releases. Where bargaining resists what is, joy looks without judgement and sees beyond. Where bargaining seeks control, joy assumes childlike trust. Spiritual teachers the world over have been saying this for millennia.
This is not to say that this, or any, phase of grief is inherently bad. It’s simply a point on the journey many of us will take. No need to try to avoid it. All we can do is notice and learn. We can offer loving awareness to that urge to strong-arm our circumstances.
God, sometimes we get caught up in illusions of control.
We think that we can force the world to bend to our will,
Or manipulate our grief away.
We hold joy at arms-length while we struggle to avoid pain.
If you missed my introduction to this Advent litany series, please go back and read the previous post.
The second stage of the grief process, as observed and synthesized by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross and Dr. David Kessler, is anger. I say it’s “second” but that doesn’t mean it always appears for everyone in some perfect order. My own experience has taught me that grief is cyclical, and I often find myself returning to various phases for deeper work. And certainly moving through phases of anger has been a significant part of my own journey.
We stay in each phase as long as it takes, which is an unpredictable length of time because grief is an unruly process.
I’m leaning into contradictions and paradox. Into what sometimes feels like impossibility! Like this: in a world of anger, violence, injustice, suffering, we are continually advised by the Christ to be at peace, to create peace, and to not be fearful. How on earth? I can see how in heaven, but how on earth? Luke writes that, going along with God’s promise, “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.”
In the meantime we have plenty to be angry about. Neither inner or societal peace are going to come about consistently without some work on our part - some training and continual embracing of the Peace of Christ, even in light of our righteous anger about unjust systems and trauma.
Advent invites us to reconcile the irreconcilable, and to learn to be comfortable with that dissonance and keep faith in spite of it. Advent offers us a peek behind the veil: what are we looking at? Now, what are we looking FOR?
God, we are challenged to live peaceably in a society filled with anger,
In which reactivity and outrage are normal,
Where most everyone is living with trauma of some kind or other,
And systemic dysfunction is all around.
We see how the dominant culture habitually covers up conflict, calling it peace,
While disregarding justice…
The Christian religion traditionally places an emphasis on the virtue of waiting with patience and hope and dedicates an entire month of its calendar to pursuit of that virtue. “Have patience ... wait for the Lord ... wait with hope,” the scriptures urge us. But when we witness the words of Christ in the texts, he embodies an immediacy - the kingdom of God is near! It’s within you! - that contradicts our churchy teachings on waiting and the traditional and Psalmic norms. A paradox.
Each year in Advent, I try to come to the season with fresh perspective, looking for something I haven’t seen before. But the truth is, I get bored by the same old Advent themes. Hope, peace, joy, love - every year the same. The boredom makes sense: Advent is a season created for waiting and waiting is often boring.
Like other worthy spiritual pursuits such as grief, shadow/ego work, lament, repentance; waiting is one we would mostly rather avoid. It feels pointless until it isn’t. And every year the wait feels longer. Not the wait for Christmas, psssht ... the wait for a better world, for the things Jesus spoke of to become our lived reality. And every year our griefs pile up.
This year I’m contemplating the boredom I personally feel toward a church ritual that can sometimes ring hollow … You know, what with murderers routinely getting off scot-free, climate emergency breathing down our necks, the deep grief of the pandemic and all the loss of life it has caused, ongoing hate and division that feels insurmountable, ongoing racial injustice and oppression, plus a million other deeply discouraging problems - given all this, having hope/peace/joy/love feels like a denial of reality. It feels less like subversion and more like insanity.
And I’m thinking about the grief so many of us feel, the grief road we walk daily. The stages of grief: Denial -> Anger -> Bargaining -> Depression -> Acceptance.
We who follow the Christ are invited onto a path of paradox, to live into many contradictions: contradictions between what we see and what we hope for, but also that contradiction between the tradition’s emphasis on waiting for “someday” and Christ’s insistence that someday is now; the tradition telling us we are waiting for a “savior” and Christ telling us that we are “it” alongside him (“greater things than these” he says we’ll do, and so forth).
How can we, in the same season, the same moment even, be present to both grief and joy, both longing and gratitude, both lament and hope? I don’t have any satisfying answers to this question. But I know I want to find them. I want to get better at living peacefully inside those tensions. And I want to be aware enough of the world around me to do at least some good here. With all this in my mind, I’m creating this year’s Advent series with a robust acknowledgement of these tensions and the paradoxes in which we live a life of faith. I’m facing the stages of grief* - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, and depression, culminating in acceptance - head on; right alongside the traditional virtues celebrated each week during Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love, culminating in what we perceive as the Gift - God With Us.
I’m using this framework in part to state the obvious: life is a mixed bag. And in part to offer a prayerful start to doing the hard work of keeping faith in the midst of the messy mixed bag, the tension of which takes some emotional maturity to keep company with.
If this is more complexity than you bargained for (lol), no worries; go check out my litanies from 2018, where I take a more simple approach.
A note on denial
No stage of the grief process is bad. Each serves its purpose. In the context of grief, Dr. Ross and Dr. Kessler note that the denial stage serves as a necessary survival strategy in the midst of shock and loss, allowing the person’s body and mind time to catch up with the new reality.
I think this also applies to our denial of problems in life - sometimes we need a little time to wrap our heads around things. But trouble starts when we stay in denial and numb ourselves to pain and decline to do anything to help. Trouble also starts when we allow pie-in-the-sky religious hope to insulate us from reality, which I judge to be bad/unhelpful behavior and I think we are reaping the rewards of that now in many areas, as anyone who is paying attention to the problems plaguing the US Church of late can observe. I suspect you Canadian and overseas friends can attest as well.
All that said, here is my litany for week 1 of Advent 2021. It feels like now is not the time for platitudes; so I’m going right in here.
God, we find ourselves with the challenge of living hopefully in a world full of pain.
We have seen how religious hope can become a toxic thing
That numbs us to reality,
Suppresses expressions of grief,
And declines to do anything to create change.
This denial is not what we want to practice …
See also “Litany for Simeons and Annas”
Friends, this is the final litany of 2020. You'll see one for New Year's here in the next couple days, and I'll post Second Sunday After Christmas (Jan 3) soon also. Then I'm going into hibernation for a couple weeks :)
Thank you all for being on this liturgy journey with me during this crazy year. Y'all keep me going.
Now, in the fullness of time,
God has sent the Christ (1).
The Christ has been born into the world,
And into our hearts,
And his imagination goes out everywhere
Bringing salvation and redemption,
Goodness and praise (2),
Healing and blessing. ..
This Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day litany is based in Isaiah 9 and Luke 2.
And now…Now the angel has brought us good news of great joy,
Which shall be for all people (1).
Now the incarnation of God has arrived (2),
Sharing in the Divine Image.
Now the grace of God has appeared,
Bringing salvation to all (3).
This litany is based entirely on the account in Luke 1 of the angel Gabriel’s visitation to young Mary. Mary gives consent to the action of the spirit of God upon her body, to bear the image of God out into the world, and to allow her plans and her life to be utterly disrupted by this work.
There is a moment
When the spinning of the earth
And the twinkling of stars
And the rushing of winds
And all movement
And all buzzing
And all frenzy
Stops….
(Note: see also my Year B Advent offerings from 2017.)
In the Advent readings for Week 3, Year B, we reflect on the proclamations of the prophet Isaiah, foretelling the work of the Christ; and the proclamation of Mary in the Magnificat. Mary consents to the work of the Spirit upon her body, and knows that it is work that will turn the world right side up, toppling unjust rulers, honoring the powerless, “filling the hungry with good things” (Luke 1:52,53).
In Advent, we practice waiting in deep expectation of the goodness of God, knowing that goodness will not fail us, keeping watch for it in the dark hours of winter.
There is a moment
When the trajectory of earth
And the trajectory of heaven collide -
A human being overshadowed by Divine Presence…
(Note: see also my Year B Advent offerings from 2017.)
This litany follows along with the Advent readings for Year B, Week 2. Themes of preparation: “prepare the way of the Lord; themes of a promise forthcoming : “we wait for new heavens and new earth, where righteousness is at home.” (2 Peter 3:13); and themes of comfort: “comfort my people (Isaiah 40:1). I have woven these themes into this week’s liturgy offering, in hopes of helping us live wholly in the difficult now and the longed-for not-yet.
In this year's Advent series, I'm using this phrase "There is a moment" as an opening line rather than the usual address of God. This is an intentional choice to help place us in the Now/Not Yet into which Advent invites us, and as a way to acknowledge the rumble of longing beneath our current reality.
I will post the remainder of this year's Advent series after December 1.
There is a moment
Just before the promise of God -
The promise of goodness -
Comes to pass;
In which we prepare inside ourselves
Space for the Divine to be born.
With this litany and the Lectionary selections for November 29, 2020, we begin a new Liturgical year. I do try to provide Advent litanies earlier than normal, as I understand clergy need to prepare for these church seasons in advance.
This litany follows closely with the themes presented in the Lectionary selections for Week 1 of Advent, Year B: themes of destruction, and the stirring of the reign of God on the horizon; of shift that are long-awaited and long-watched for.
This year, Advent’s subtle and shadowy themes resonate for me even more profoundly than usual, given the struggles of the year. I can echo the prophet Isaiah more readily this year: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 64:1). We have felt the metaphors of the darkened sun and moon, the stars falling from the heavens, which Jesus describes in Mark 13, if we are paying attention. The shifts the scriptures describe - when the Son of Man comes in glory, when God’s might comes to save us (Psalm 80:2), when restoration comes (Psalm 80:7) - feel crucial, necessary, imminent.
In this year's Advent series, I'm using this phrase "There is a moment" as an opening line rather than the usual address of God. This is an intentional choice to help place us in the Now/Not Yet into which Advent invites us, and as a way to acknowledge the rumble of longing beneath our current reality.
There is a moment,
As when fire kindles brushwood
Or heat brings water to a boil (1),
When the character of God is revealed…
The lectionary passages for this week present us with two Divine emanations: the Wisdom, or Sophia, of God, “covering the earth like a mist,” portrayed as female; and the Christ, God’s human incarnation, through whom “all things came into being,” who is known in male form among humans. We are on the cusp of Epiphany, the revelation of Jesus as Christ, and here we find ourselves being reminded of Wisdom. I like to think of her as the gift of Consciousness. The creator gives us animus, life, and then consciousness finds a resting place within us as host.
The scriptures say that Wisdom “took root in an honored people” and “entered the soul of a servant of the Lord.” It’s mysterious and I love it. And it’s a perfect theme for a prayer to start the new year.
Wisdom, you came from the mouth of God,
And covered the earth like a mist,
You opened the mouths of the mute,
And made unconscious beings conscious.
You find souls who are willing to hold you
And guide, shelter, and reward them.
For the first Sunday after Christmas. This litany is inspired by the account in Matthew 2 in which the Holy Family flees the murderous despotism of Herod, leaving secretly on a night journey toward Egypt.
God, as the Holy Family fled their home country
To find refuge in a new place (1),
In the secrecy of night,
For their safety, for their lives,To escape the rule of despots (2)
And the hands of murderers…
This year's Christmas litany is perhaps more poetic and abstract than others I've supplied. I like to lean into the poetry and metaphor of the major holy days. If your community is not down to poeticize, you can peruse my selection of Christmas litanies from prior years. But I hope you'll use your imagination and go with me here to a silent night filled with feminine energy and imagery, love and light finding embodiment and beginning in a human woman's belly.
Christmas blessings to you and your community.
Silent night.
A feminine hollow
Filled with Divinity,
Demonstrating humanity’s worth.
I had trouble keeping this litany as brief as it is. There's so much wisdom and depth in the story of the Mother. In the way human salvation from humanity's misperceptions and misdeeds, this great Correction of Our Understanding, came from within a human body. The wisdom came from within. The Divinity came from within. From a place that might have been overlooked or forgotten: the belly of a girl with no power, no influence, no streams of income, no security.
And yet, her "soul rejoices in God her savior." And her song in Luke 1 gives us a grand poetic account of her transformed (saved) understanding. Within her gut Wisdom grows; Word is made flesh; Love gains body. And she BIRTHS it out into the world! Human salvation (by this I mean: setting a-right, justice, redemption from oppression and power hierarchy - not some measly personal salvation from after-life "hell" we usually hear about) begins in the belly of divinely touched humanity!!
Gosh, I could go on and on. I hope it's enough.
God, we are not satisfied*
Not with the way things are,
Not with the direction things are headed,
Not with the status quo…
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing” (Isaiah 35:1)
This week’s Advent Litany is inspired by the Lectionary passages from Isaiah 35 and Mary’s Magnificat in the first chapter of Luke.
God, from barren things
We never expected fruit.
From dry ground
We didn’t expect shade….
I'm in love with this year's Advent litany titles. I dunno, sometimes these details just get me.
I've read Isaiah 11 a hundred times in my life and it still makes me weep with the hope of it. Apex predators napping with baby lambs. Lions munching straw as counter-culturally as you please. A community led by Wisdom, where Justice is a given and not something we have to endlessly fight for ... Will it ever arrive? Will this day ever come? The day no one is hurt or destroyed. The day no babies suffer. The day everyone can let their guard down because the danger has passed.
To me, this is the gospel: this Peaceful Kin-dom waiting in the wings for us to become conscious of it. This Kin-dom that touches every part of creation (male, female, human, plant, animal, ocean, mountain, cosmos) and rights every wrong both here and in the hereafter. And this is the work of Advent: to become conscious of the Peaceable Community. Hallelujah Amen.
God, things are looking hopeless,
As they are, we’re not sure how to go on.
We look around and see death and destruction,
Greed, dishonesty, strife, ego-seduction.
A new Liturgical Year! I love getting started with the hope and longing of Advent. I love the depth that the year's reflective opener supports. Down into the darkness. We plumb the depths for hidden light.
God, we are exhausted by ourselves.
We’ve been misled and exploited.
We’ve been complicit in exploitation.
We’ve been lulled into becoming part of the problem.