Advent Love: A Candle-lighting Liturgy

Posted on December 10, 2023 by Jenn Cavanaugh

Open the heavens and come down, O God of love.

Bring Your love so near we can feel it

not just in our hearts, but on our skin,

like the sun on our upturned faces.

We have seen glimpses of Your love in communities

that surrounded us with care, stood by our sides, and had our backs.

When we heard confidence and optimism in our children’s voices,

we knew Your presence.

Give us eyes keen enough to catch Your love in action,

and spirits quick enough to reflect Your grace,

as water catches and reflects the light.

We have heard Your promises:

that You love us no matter what,

with a love greater even than faith and hope.

Where Your love rules, everything changes.

The stranger will be met with a smile.

The hurt will find a healer.

Jesus, lover of our souls, come soothe where hate burns.

Help us to love one another as You have loved us,

with an untamed love that is not safe, but it is good—

a love that spends its life for others.

Anoint us with your Spirit to bring good news

to all in need of Your healing touch.

Restore what has been broken in rage.

Make us crafters of beauty from ashes.

We are God’s people.

We light this candle as a sign of God’s love

that sets up camp among us,

tending the displaced and the wounded,

then sends us out to do the same.

O come, Immanuel.

(This year’s Advent candle-lighting liturgies are crafted around the 2023 lectionary texts and input from congregants of Bethany Presbyterian Church of Seattle)

Advent Hope 2023: A Candle-lighting Liturgy

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Posted on December 3, 2023 by Jenn Cavanaugh

Open the heavens and come down, O God of hope.

Bring your hope so near we can taste it—

Crisp and refreshing as apples,

Warm and tingly as a spiked hot chocolate.

We have seen glimpses of your hope in communities of solidarity and recovery

and in rich conversations with our brothers and sisters in the faith.

When the local whale watchers protected the humpback calf from harm,

we knew your presence.

Give us hope to trust you are at work in ways we cannot see,

like an ambient melody

that elevates and alters a space.

We have heard your promises:

that you have good plans for each of us

and that you will be with us wherever we go,

in heaven, on earth, and in every place they meet in You.

Every child shall have vision for a future beyond politicking and conflict.

The young shall teach us to build one another up in mutual respect.

Christ, our hope, make a way through the desert of despair.

Lead us to campsites in lush meadows by hidden pools.

Comfort us and give us hope,

that we may comfort others in your name.

Anoint us with your Spirit to bring good news

to those sleeping outside and suffering in war zones.

Inspire our leaders.

Restore our humanity.

We are God’s people.

We light this candle as a sign of God’s hope

that brightens grey skies

like the rosy brushstrokes of dawn

and the glow of the turning leaves

O come, Immanuel.

(This year’s Advent candle-lighting liturgies are crafted around the 2023 lectionary texts and input from congregants of Bethany Presbyterian Church of Seattle)

Lenten Calendar: Meditation

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Jenn Cavanaugh

krzyz-w-zadymce.jpg!Large Jozef Chelmonski

Krzyż w zadymce (Cross in the Blizzard) by Józef Chełmoński

You must descend from
your head into your heart.
At present your thoughts of God
are in your head. And God Himself is,
as it were, outside you, and
so your prayer and other spiritual
exercises
remain exterior. Whilst you are still
in your head,
thoughts will not easily be subdued but
will always be whirling about, like snow
in winter or
clouds of mosquitoes in summer.

— Theophan the Recluse

A lectionary text to practice on:

I remember the days of old,
    I think about all your deeds,
    I meditate on the works of your hands.
I stretch out my hands to you;
    my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Selah

— Psalm 143:5-6

Read it to yourself–and do what it says.

Read it out loud–and do what it says.

Read the poem again. Read the text again. And do what they say.

Rest a soft gaze on the painting while observing your thoughts. Are they still gusting and storming? Regulate them with your breathing and by gently guiding them back to the words of the psalm:

[inhale]: Teach me to do your will,
[exhale:] for you are my God;
[inhale:] may your good Spirit
[exhale:] lead me on level ground.

— Psalm 143:10

Let the words descend from your head to your heart.

Lenten Calendar: Telling

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Jenn Cavanaugh

This week’s lectionary readings play with the conceit of the rock that Moses struck to provide the newly liberated Israelites with fresh “living” water. “Strike the rock,” God says, “and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Exodus 17:6b-7)

“Is the LORD among us or not?” seems like a perfectly reasonable and non-rhetorical question. Some questions are mysteries to sit with and ponder, invitations to meditation, but this is the kind of question that demands an answer. It’s one that God answers when asked, even when the answer isn’t what the people expected. It’s one that Jesus answers even when he’s not asked. God wants us to know joy in “the rock of our salvation” (Psalm 95:1), and hope “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5), and then to pass on this knowledge. Jesus tells the woman at the well that if she “knew the gift of God” she would have approached him asking for a drink, instead of the other way around (John 4:10). He tells her that this living water will become in those that drink it “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Then he tells her everything she’s ever done and who he is, and she tells everyone else.

She and they and we become springs fed by the source: the rock that was struck.

In uncertain times, Gwendolyn Brooks names our desire to just be told what to do to so that everything will be okay. At first the answers given seem equally simplistic. Wear your boots [read: wash your hands!] and you won’t get sick! But then at some point — I’m not sure which point; I imagine it’s subjective by design — the simplistic answers seem to acquire a simple wisdom and move from the immediate to the important, from the actionable to the true and actual.

“One Wants a Teller in a Time Like This” by Gwendolyn Brooks – photo by Jenn Cavanaugh

[I couldn’t help but notice that not even the famous poets and poems are secure]

Lenten Calendar: Hiding

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Jenn Cavanaugh

Today’s lectionary psalm is Psalm 32 – a maskil, or contemplative psalm imparting wisdom. It deals in visceral images of the pain and futility of trying to hide our dark secrets from God.

When I kept silent,
    my bones wasted away
    through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
    your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
    as in the heat of summer.

This oppressive feeling of guilt and shame lifts completely after coming clean with God, but then this psalm we’re supposed to think about and learn from does a funny thing. Just after busting the myth that we can hide from God, it refers to God as a hiding place. Obviously not from God, but from those who would punish us for giving up our pretense and deceit. God’s presence is the safest place to be our whole selves.

La Voix du sang by René Magritte

The lyrics to Our Lady Peace’s “Hiding Place” echo those of the psalm…

Have you seen what I saw
The sky came down from afar?

Have you been there before
That place where hearts’re reborn?

I’m looking for a place to go
I’m waiting on another
Hiding place for hearts

Have you dreamed of a world
Where armor sheaths your bones?

Have you ransomed your soul
To pay for all that you’ve got wrong?

Never give up

… and the video evokes the feelings of danger and safety.

Advent Again – day 16

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Jenn Cavanaugh

On that day the deaf shall hear
the words of a scroll,
and out of their gloom and darkness
the eyes of the blind shall see. – Isaiah 29:18

“Dark Sea” by Dave Anderson http://clampart.com/2012/04/dark-sea/dark-sea/

from “Song for the Last Act” by Louise Bogan

…

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

Advent Again – day 15

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Jenn Cavanaugh

“The desert shall rejoice and blossom”

“Haiti – Beyond the Ruins: Cathedral” by Bryn Gillette

from “Illumination” by Elizabeth Woody

…

Tender events are meeting halves and wholes of affinity,

the recurrence of whimsy and parallel streams

flush away the blockage of malaise.

Incessant gratitude, pliable kindness smolders

in the husk of these sweet accumulations:

abalone shells, the thoughtful carvings from friends,

the stone of another’s pocket, the photo of mystified

moon over water, the smiles of worn chairs.

…

The sun has its own drum contenting itself with the rose

heart it takes into continual rumbling. The connection

of surface and hand. The great head of dark clouds finds

its own place of unraveled repercussions and disruption,

elsewhere, over the tall, staunch mountains of indemnity.

Advent Again – day 10

Posted on December 6, 2016 by Jenn Cavanaugh

“so that all may see and know…”

[Psalm #5] from 99 Psalms by SAID, translated from the German by Mark S Burrows

(Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2013)

lord

let me be a water puddle

that mirrors your heavens

and murmurs your prayers

so that the cicadas might understand me

“Puddle” by M.C. Escher

show yourself o lord

even if you have no other choice

than to come in the fierce coursing of blood

and take in the refugees

because every fleeing ends in your eye

even if those who flee forget you in their time of need

because only those who doubt in you

seek you

Advent Again – day 7

Posted on December 3, 2016 by Jenn Cavanaugh

“What shall I cry?”

from “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,

How the view alters….

Painting by Jeremy Mann

Advent Again – day 6

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Jenn Cavanaugh

“Is this the time…?”

from “A Letter from Li Po, part XII” by Conrad Aiken

“Light Wind and Bright Moonlight” by Maolin Zhang (2002)

The hour is open as the mind is open.

Closed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens

to receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes

to feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm

our human inheritance of touch. The air tonight

brings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,

borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.

On that invisible wave we lift, we too,

and drag at secret moorings,

stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.

And they are here, Li Po and all the others,

our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf’s footstep

touches the grass: those who were lost at sea

and those the innocents the too-soon dead:

all mankind

and all it ever knew is here in-gathered,

held in our hands, and in the wind

breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.

How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House

how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,

now long since dead, but then how young,

how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost

looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard

borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:

the father within him, the mother within him, the self

coming to self through love of each for each.

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Open the heavens and come down, O God of hope.

Bring your hope so near we can taste it—

Crisp and refreshing as apples,

Warm and tingly as a spiked hot chocolate.

We have seen glimpses of your hope in communities of solidarity and recovery

and in rich conversations with our brothers and sisters in the faith.

When the local whale watchers protected the humpback calf from harm,

we knew your presence.

Give us hope to trust you are at work in ways we cannot see,

like an ambient melody

that elevates and alters a space.

We have heard your promises:

that you have good plans for each of us

and that you will be with us wherever we go,

in heaven, on earth, and in every place they meet in You.

Every child shall have vision for a future beyond politicking and conflict.

The young shall teach us to build one another up in mutual respect.

Christ, our hope, make a way through the desert of despair.

Lead us to campsites in lush meadows by hidden pools.

Comfort us and give us hope,

that we may comfort others in your name.

Anoint us with your Spirit to bring good news

to those sleeping outside and suffering in war zones.

Inspire our leaders.

Restore our humanity.

We are God’s people.

We light this candle as a sign of God’s hope

that brightens grey skies

like the rosy brushstrokes of dawn

and the glow of the turning leaves

O come, Immanuel.

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