The heavens write large their rejoicing! The clouds are jubilant! The earth sings out gladness and beauty, joy and delight! Alleluia! Christ is risen! Risen indeed! Inspired by Isaiah 49:13 and Taize’s Jubilate Coeli. Jemma Allen is a priest in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. She works as a counsellor… Read More
Maundy Thursday Prayer: Remember
“Do this to remember me…” However we do this with a loaf, wafers, cubes of bread… However we do the doing in vestments our Sunday best barefoot or high-heeled Dear God, help us to remember not the to-do list or the thing we forgot to write on the to-do list or who is doing what… Read More
Thursday Prayer: Festival of Lists
A friend calls this liturgical season the Festival of Lists. In this season of all the lists all the liturgies all the last-minute glitches we ask, O God, for your blessing: A blessing of a photocopier that keeps copying. A blessing of volunteers who bear with one another and with their pastors with generosity and… Read More
Thursday Prayer: Weary
“I will satisfy the weary, and all who are faint I will replenish” Jeremiah 31: 25 For the weary, we pray: For those who have waited, and hoped and watched but for whom the better day has not yet dawned… Satisfy the weary, replenish the faint For those whose bodies are worn by working and… Read More
Thursday Prayer: disrupting the status quo
Dear God, Make us in your likeness: that we might disrupt what is taken for granted, and be challengers of the status quo that privileges the normative white, straight, able-bodied. Nourish us with the stories of our forebears: that their actions might fuel prophetic imaginations in our own time. Equip and empower us to work… Read More
Thursday Prayer: for dropped balls and endless to-do lists
As jobs slide off the to-do list and are anxiously remembered: grace As balls are dropped and others are lost in the stretch to pick them up: grace As holiday cards sit, stampless on the dining room table: grace With this breath, in this moment: grace May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ (that… Read More
Thursday Prayer: in the beginning
In the stories about the beginning,you, O God,bring order from chaos:giving boundaries,separating water and land,making edges. Help us to knowwhere we start and stop,how to hold our space without intruding on others,how to discern what is ours to do,where our edges are:that we might join you in your work in the world.… Read More
Thursday Prayer: St Nicholas
Dear God, It is hard to know what is true about your faithful servant, Nicholas of Myra. “Life (highly legendary)” says one biographic entry. And it can be hard to imagine how any of what happens these days in the name of St Nick has anything much to do with that fourth century bishop. But… Read More
Thursday Prayer: lighting a candle
This is a prayer of inarticulate longing… This is a prayer of agitated pacing… This is a prayer of fists stuffed in pockets… This is a prayer of the lump in the throat… This is a prayer that doesn’t know what or how to pray… This is the prayer of lighting a candle, of turning… Read More
Thursday Prayer: holy disruptions
We praise you, O Holy Disrupter and Bringer of Beauty. We praise you, and thank you for the life you bring us. We praise you and thank you and ask that your Spirit might continue to disrupt and disturb our categories and order, our ideas about who and what belongs, our categorisation of beauty, that… Read More
