A prayer for when you’re about consume media

 O Discerning Spirit, who alone judges all things rightly, now be present in my mind and active in my imagination as I prepare to engage with the claims and questions of diverse cultures incarnated in the stories that people tell. 

Let me experience mediums of art and expression, neither as a passive consumer nor as an entertainment glutton, but rather as one who through such works would more fully and compassionately enter this ongoing, human conservation of mystery and meaning, wonder and beauty, good and evil, sorrow and joy, fear and love. 

All truth is your truth, O Lord, and all beauty is your beauty. Therefore use human expressions of celebration and longing as catalysts to draw my mind toward ever deeper insight, my imagination into new and wondering awe, and my heartbeat into closer rhythm with your own. 

Shape my vision by your fixed precepts, and tutor me, Holy Spirit, that I might learn to discern the difference between those stories that are whole, echoing the greater narrative of your redemption, and those that are bent broken, failing to trace accurately the patterns of your eternal thoughts and so failing to name rightly the true condition of humanity and of all creation. 

Grant me wisdom to divide rightly, to separate form from content, craft from narrative, and meaning from emotion. Bless me with the great discernment to be able to celebrate the stamp of your divine image revealed in an excellence of craft and artistry even while grieving a lacking of meaning or hope in the same work. 

Guard my mind against the old enticement to believe a lie simply because it is beautifully told. Let me not be careless. Give me right conviction to judge my own motives in that which I approve, teaching me to be always mindful of that which I consume, and thoughtful of the ways in which I consume it. Impart to me keener knowledge of the limits of my own heart in light of my own particular brokenness, that I might choose what would be for my flourishing and not for my harm. 

And give me the grace to understand that what causes me to stumble might bear no I’ll consequence for another of your children, so that while I am to care for my brothers and sisters, I must also allow them, in matters of conscience, the freedom to sometimes choose a thing your Spirit convicts me to refrain from. Even so, let my own freedoms in Christ never be flaunted or exercised in such a way as to give cause for confusion, temptation, or stumbling in others. 

May the stories I partake of, and the ways in which I engage with them, make me in the end a more empathetic Christ-bearer, more compassionate, more aware of my own brokenness and need for grace, better able to understand the hopes and fears and failings of my fellow humans, so that I might more authentically live and learn and love among them unto the end that all of our many stories might be more beautifully woven into your own greater story. 

Amen

A prayer for those who fear failure

 I come to you, O Christ, in dismay, fearing I might fail in what is before me. 

Knowing, that if I would truly serve my Maker, in whatever capacity or vocation, it is not necessary for your own good, and for the good of the kingdom of God, that I would sometimes be met with such fear and dismay?

But how could such a besetting fear ever be for my good, or for the good of God’s eternal kingdom?

Maybe, under the Spirit’s tutelage, such fears might become messengers of grace, revealing to you only what was true all along, in yourself you do not have the strength or the wisdom or the ability to accomplish the task to which you are called. 

Apart from the Spirit of God breathing life into your incomplete and sin-tainted efforts, apart from the Father blessing and multiplying your inadequate offerings, apart from your Lord meeting you in your stumbling attempts at faithfulness, no good work will come to fruition, no achievement will endure, no lasting benefit will come from your labours. 

And so I must come repeatedly to the end of trust in my strength, that I might avail myself again and again of his strength. 

Then let my fears of failure drive me, O Lord, to collapse here upon your strong shoulders, and here to rest, reminded again that I and all of your children are always utterly dependent upon you to bring to completion, in and through us, the good works which you have prepared beforehand for us to do. It is not my own work that is before me now, but yours!

Yes, I will take heart in this revelation! That outcomes of my labours are never in my hands, but in God’s. I have but one task, to be faithful. 

The success of our endeavours is not ours to judge. You work in ways that we cannot comprehend. And in your economy, there will be no waste. Even what we judge as failure, You will tool to greater purpose. 

If that is true, what greater end could you intend to work from my failings?

Who can discern? But consider that our tender Father might use even our failures and weaknesses to make us more humble and more sympathetic to the failures and failings of others, thereby shaping our hearts into a nearer likeness of the heart of Christ?

If our greatest good is to bear in fuller measure the image of our Lord, then might not his greatest and most holy good to us come cloaked in guise of defeat and dismay?

And if that is our Lord’s sacred intention, then who is to say how great a success even our failures might be, when read aright at last in the chronicles of eternity?

So we relinquish now all vain attempts to parse the mysteries of God’s intent. We cannot think your thoughts, or reckon your deep purposes. It is enough to know that all you do is done in love for us. 

Amen

Use then, O Lord, even my failures, and my fears of failing, to advance your purposes in my heart and in your kingdom and in this world. My confidence is only in you. 

Amen

A prayer for those with a burden to intercede

 I sense your beckoning, O Lord, and I willingly respond, entering your presence to plead on behalf of another. 

Spirit of God, you alone know the specific needs of the one for whom I am suddenly burdened to intercede. 

Therefore guide my prayer. 

Tune my thoughts, my words, my empathies to articulate your greater heart, your deeper purposes. I yield to your intentions, even unto the breaking of my own heart for that which break yours. 

Through me, O God, may it please you to bring forth effective petition for the one whose condition has so moved your heart that you have now moved mine, calling me to fervent prayer – to cry out, to contend, to do battle – on their behalf. 

Breathe through me, O Spirit, your thoughts, your words. Kindle in me, O Father, your sorrows and consolations. Teach me, O Christ, how to serve and to love by intercession. 

(Pause for a moment and sense of The Spirit’s promptings in prayer. Now make petition and intercession on behalf of them/those you are burdened for.)

Intersect my moments with your mercies, O Lord. Intersect my days with evidence of your grace. Let this burden remain or return as often as you would have me carry it again to you. 

You are ever at work in this world. So let my compassion be always active and my heart sensitive to your movements, your promptings, your revelation. 

Call me, your child, always to care for one another in prayer and in action, in our various times of need. 

Amen

A prayer for the nappy changers

 Ah Lord, what a mess we sometimes make of our lives!

What a tragic comedy is even our most sincere attempt to merit righteousness on our own. 

We are no more able to render ourselves holy than this child to keep itself unsoiled. 

I am as dependent upon your grace and your own righteousness, O Christ, to justify and make me clean, as this dear one is dependent upon me to wash the residue of filth from its skin, wrapping it again in soft fresh padding.

Let me not be frustrated by the constant repetition of this necessary act on behalf of a child. 

Rather, let the daily doing of this be a reminder to me, of the constant cleansing and covering of my own sin, that I – helpless as this young one and more often in need – enjoy in the active mercies of Christ.

Amen

A prayer for those who weep without knowing

 There is so much in this world, O Lord, so much that aches and groans and shivers for want of redemption, so much that seems dislocated, upended, desecrated, unhinged – even in our own hearts.

Even in our own hearts, we bear the mark of all that is broken. What is best in this world has been bashed and battered and trodden down. What was meant to be the substance has become the brittle shell, haunted by the ghosts of a glory so long crumbled that only its rubble is remembered now.

Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes, without knowing why? It might be anything. And then again, it might be everything.

For we feel this. We who are your children feel this empty space where some lost thing should have rested in its perfection, and we pine for those nameless glories, and we pine for all the wasted stories in our world, and we pine for these present wounds. We pine for our children and for their children too, knowing each will have to prove how this universal pain is also personal. We pine for all children born into these days of desolation – whose regal robes were torn to tatters before they were even swaddled in them.

O Lord, how can we not weep, when waking each day in this vale of tears? How can we not feel those pangs, when we, wounded by others, so soon learn to wound as well, and in the end wound even ourselves? We grieve what we cannot heal and we grieve our half-belief, having made uneasy peace with disillusion, aligning ourselves with a self-protective lie that would have us kill our best hopes just to keep our disappointments half-confined.

We feel ourselves wounded by what is wretched, foul, and fell, but we are sometimes wounded by the beauty as well, for when it whispers, it whispers of the world that might have been our birthright, now banished, now withdrawn, as unreachable to our wounded hearts as ancient seas receding down some endless dark.

We weep, O Lord, for those things that, though nameless, are still lost. We weep for the cost of our rebellions, for the mocking and hollowing of holy things, for the inward curve of our souls, for the evidences of death outworked in every field and tree and blade of grass, crept up in every creature, alert in every longing, infecting all fabrics of life.

We weep for the leers our daughters will endure, as if to be made in reflection of your beauty were a fault for which they must pay. We weep for our sons, sabotaged by profiteers who seek to warp their dreams before they even come of age. We weep for all the twisted alchemies of our times that would turn what might have been gold into crowns of cheap tin and then toss them into garbage bins as if love could ever be a castoff thing one might simply be done with.

We weep for the wretched expressions of all things that were first built of goodness and glory but are now their own shadow twins. We have wept so often. And we will weep again.

And yet, there is somewhere on our tears a hope still kept.

We feel it in this darkness, like a tiny flame, when we are told.

Jesus also wept.

You wept.

So moved by the pain of this crushed creation, you, O Lord, heaved with the grief of it, drinking the anguish like water and sweating it out of your skin like blood.

Is it possible that you – in your sadness over Lazarus, in your grieving for Jerusalem, in your sorrow in the garden – is it possible that you have sanctified our weeping too?

For the grief of God is no small thing, and the weeping of God is not without effect. The tears of Jesus preceded a resurrection of the dead.

O Spirit of God, is it then possible that our tears might also be a kind of intercession?

That we, your children, in our groaning with the sadness of creation, could be joining in some burdened work of coming restoration? Is it possible that when we weep and don’t know why, it is because the curse has ranged so far, so wide? That we weep at that which breaks your heart, because it has also broken ours – sometimes so deeply that we cannot explain our weeping, even to ourselves?

If that is true, then let such weeping be received, O Lord, as an intercession newly forged of holy sorrow. Then let our tears anoint these broken things, and let our grief be as their consecration – a preparation for their promised redemption, our sorrow sealing them for that day when you will take the ache of all creation, and turn it inside-out, like the shedding of an old gardener’s glove.

O Lord, if it please you, when your children weep and don’t know why, yet use our tears, to baptism what you love.

Amen.