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See also: “Litany for You’re Enough a.k.a. Litany for Hannah” from 2018 for Proper 28 of Ordinary Time.

This week’s texts come with a strong sense of the temporality of our time here on the earth. The passage from Daniel 12 has an apocalyptic feel, and Christ’s words in Mark 13 have been fodder for many an end-times enthusiast and fear-monger.

But when I read the Psalm…

“I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

...I feel the answering steadfastness of the Divine.

We may hear of wars and rumors of even more wars, we may be afraid that our society is crumbling before our eyes, we may be staring catastrophic climate emergency in the face. I hear Jesus’ frank admission, with an accompanying shrug and an incline of the head, that we are going to encounter a lot of chaos here. But we who share in the Divine Image and Presence (all of us who are willing and awake to it) “rest secure.” We don’t need to be ok to be ok. We are still ok, still safe, still cared-for, even when the world is burning down. There is nowhere else to go but the love of God.

The writer of Hebrews invites us to “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” And these passages provoke me to greater faith and commitment to doing those good deeds.

God, when the world is burning down,
When we are reaping the rewards of avarice and injustice,
When we are beset by calamity,
When we are at odds with our neighbors,
When our society’s obsessions and prejudices are revealed
When nature and history are rebuking us…

get the full litany

This past Sunday at Peace of Christ Church, I preached a word about moving our framework for evaluating our faith paradigms from a metaphor of “Deconstruction” to a metaphor of “Renovation”. I shared my personal “4 pillars of conviction” that hold my spirituality and faith up these days, after many years of renovation. You can hear the sermon here.

This litany accompanies that sermon. I’m happy to share the full litany freely here with you. Please read, pray, and share the link with people for whom it might be helpful. If you use my liturgies regularly or would like to help support my ongoing work, https://www.patreon.com/franpratt.

God, we are thankful for the freedom we have to live authentically.
To choose how we live and what we believe,
To determine how to put our faith into practice,
And to select the practices that best serve us and the world.

We thank you for the gift of the Spirit of God in us,
Who leads and guides us,
Who fills our eyes with a vision of wholeness for all,
And fills our hearts with super-human love.

We know we have work to do
To renovate our own souls,
To learn to live from a place of contemplation and compassion,
To reject our ego and it’s traps;
So that we may send out into the world redemptive love,
Justice work,
Christ-consciousness,
Peace-making.

We know that the healing of the world starts in our own souls,
Begins with an inner posture of humility,
Grows with curiosity and risk-taking faith,
And from there, moves mountains of pain.

Love and suffering are our teachers here*,
And we embrace our mission to grow and learn.
Help us as we do the work of renovation
Of our faith, our practice, and our understanding.
Keep us to your Way, which you’ve shown us in Christ’s body.
And wrap us all in your transforming love.

Amen

*this is an oft-repeated idea in many of Richard Rohr’s books.