Gloriously Beloved,
Thank you so much for all your prayers and healing thoughts as my mother was hospitalized this past weekend. She now has a clean bill of health!
And…because of you being the faithful and wonderful church you are, along with the excellent work of mother Carol Schwenke, preacher Ron Balthazor, Jonathan and Joe, and our guest soloist Deborah Stephens, church was phenomenal while I was away unexpectedly.
This coming Sunday I am away “expectedly”. My brother and I are very happy to take my mother on a family cruise for her 80th birthday. Thank you again to mother Carol, and all the good folks at Saint Gregory the great, in all the ministries that make worship happen.
I do know that while this is a time of rest and travel and vacation for some, that it is also a time of anxiety, grief, and sadness as we take note of what is happening in the world around us. We pray for our brothers and sisters who suffered a mass shooting at Saint Stephens Episcopal Church in Alabama, sadly only one of many mass shootings that has happened almost daily for the past six weeks or so. Surges of COVID continue to occur, wars are being fought, civil rights for the marginalized are in danger, and hope may be in short supply.
But God is still good and God is still on the throne. Meaning there is always love, hope, and beauty.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
God has made everything beautiful in its time. God has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
May this prayer and blessing by author Cole Arthur Riley put words to those truths for us as we speak to the God who loves us:
God of tension and beauty,
It seems there is so much at stake in the world and in ourselves, that to look away would be callous. We will not become numb to suffering. But sustain us, God. Remind us of the beautiful as we try to survive the tragedies of this world. Awaken us to the artists and creatives in our midst— Those whose songs, and paintings, and words, and films can hold the seams of our souls together when under the harshest duress. Awaken us to the stars, the rain falling, the flowers resurrecting; that even when we find ourselves too exhausted to create, we might be held by the beauty of your own creation. Remind us that violence and oppression cannot conquer beauty itself. That our love, our lament, our rage, are each in their own way messengers of beauty in an aching world.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the Word by which all beauty is created, with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever more, Amen.
Breath prayer
Inhale:
I resist the tyranny of despair.
Exhale:
God awaken my soul to beauty.
A blessing for those in grief:
Finding the beautiful is not the same as naïve optimism. Beauty cannot be destroyed by sorrow, but sorrow is not to be destroyed by beauty. You don’t have to become numb to one to hold the other. They each grant the other the courage to remain.
Cole Arthur Riley@BlackLiturgires,
Instagram
Much love,
Mo. Nikki+