Prayers
Opening Prayer - Strategy Team - 15 June 2016
Mary Beth Stein shared this prayer with the team:
Holy One, for the longest time we have prayed, "Your kingdom come,"
and often we have wanted it to come in a supernatural way that did not ask too much of us.
We have longed for your reign but imagined it elsewhere,
not recognizing that it truly is a gift you have already given
- - but a gift that calls forth all our own gifts to receive it as fully as you intend.
Let your kingdom come into our hearts and into our hands,
and help us to activate it in our lives through the choices we make and the relationships we enter.
May our own self-transcendence cause us to grow in freedom,
and from the place of freedom may we choose to live in compassion and love.
Amen.
(Judy Cannato: Field of Compassion: How the New Cosmology is Transforming Spiritual Life, p95.)
Did the Woman Say?
by Frances Croake Frank
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?
Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.
Quoted in the essay Mary, the Virgin Priest? by Professor Tina Beattie, on the website Women Priests - the Case for Ordaining Women in the Roman Catholic Church
Opening Prayer - Strategy Team meeting - 11 May 2016
Suggested by Ed Shreurs
![]() |
InvictusOut of the night that covers me, |
A Statement of Faith
Composed by Christina Reymer for the Strategy Team meeting on 27 April 2016
We believe in God, creating all that is. We believe in the Spirit of God, |
|
Opening Prayer - Strategy Team Meeting - 30 March 2016
In the name of
the Creator with whom we share divinity,
the redeemer with whom we share humanity, and the Holy Spirit
who unsettles and inspires us.
God of Surprises,
you call us
from the narrowness of our traditions
to new ways of being church
from the captivities of our culture
to creative witness for justice
from the smallness of our horizons
to the bigness of your vision.
Clear the way in us, your people,
that we might call others
to freedom and renewed faith
and that all might know the beauty and power and danger of the gospel,
especially through the ministerial witness
of women and men who,
with their many gifts,
bring healing to a suffering church and people.
[Drawn from a prayer written by Gwen Cashmore and Joan Puls in 1992. It is based on 'Hanta Yo', a Lakota Sioux invocation meaning 'Clear the Way';Used for the Prayer Service for Women's Ordination on the 17th Annual World Day of Prayer - 25 March 2011 as created by Women's Ordination Worldwide, Liturgy Committee]