Song writer and musician Steve Bell has several beautiful posts for this holy weekend that I thought you might like to be aware of
This one for Good Friday features the song Gone is the Light
Gone is the Light
Music and lyric by Gord Johnson
appears on Steve Bell’s Devotion album (see below)
Into the darkness we must go
Gone, gone is the light
Into the darkness we must go
Gone, gone is the light
Jesus remember me
When you enter your Kingdom
Jesus remember me
When your kingdom comes
Father forgive them
They know not what they do
Father forgive them
They know not what they do
Into the darkness we must go
Gone, gone is the light
Into the darkness we must go
Gone gone is the light
And this one for Easter Sunday features another beautiful song Was It a Morning Like This.
Was it a Morning Like This | Jim Croegaert
Was it a morning like this
When the sun still hid from Jerusalem
And Mary rose from her bed
To tend the Lord she thought was dead
Was it a morning like this
When Mary walked down from Jerusalem
And two angels stood at the tomb
Bearers of news she would hear soon
chorus:
Did the grass sing
Did the earth rejoice to feel you again
Over and over like a trumpet underground
Did the earth seem to pound He is risen!
Over and over like in a never ending round
He is risen! Alleluia!
Was it a morning like this
When Peter and John ran from Jerusalem
And as they raced for the tomb
Beneath their feet was there a tune
This morning I posted this prayer on the Light for the Journey Facebook page.
Lord Jesus Christ today we are reminded
of how you knelt to wash our feet.
In a lowly act of service you poured out love.
Leading us away from power and prestige,
You showed us what true kingship looks like.
Earth shattering, profound,
A reversal of the status quo,
That we still struggle to imitate.
May we today follow your example.
May we kneel and wash the feet of others.
And in so doing share the wonder of your love.
The radical counter cultural nature of Jesus action is almost incomprehensible to us. A God who kneels to wash our feet as a servant. This was a job not just for a servant but for the lowliest of servants.
Two phrases stood out for me as I read the account of Jesus revolutionary action in John 13 this morning. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth and now he loved them to the very end. (v2) and I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. (v15)
All that Jesus has been trying to tell his disciples is summed up in this act of servanthood which John describes as one of the final acts of love Jesus shows towards his disciples. Don’t go after power, wealth and position. Don’t expect others to kneel and wash your feet, get down on your knees and wash theirs.
No wonder the import of this story usually passes us by. It has a part of a ceremony rather than a real act of life. But this is the prelude for the Last Supper. Perhaps it is the prerequisite for us truly being able to take communion together in the way that God intended us to.
So my question for all of us as we stand in the shadow of the cross today is: How can we too kneel and wash the feet of others today? How can we become more like the servants God intends us to be and so share the wonder of Christ’s love?
I posted this prayer on the Light for the Journey Facebook page this morning. Its popularity convinced me to add a photo and post it here as well. Enjoy
Susan Forshey just sent me this beautiful reflection with a link to the Booklet of prayers for which is a simple liturgy of the hours for Holy Week that she has produced. Enjoy and thanks Susan for sharing this with us.
A Prayer Booklet for Holy Week
With Palm Sunday, we enter into the Passion week, a Holy Week, remembering the Lord’s final days and building in anticipation toward the Resurrection.
For the world, this is much like any other week, and paradoxically, for ministers and others working in Christian contexts, it can be a week with little time for prayer and reflection.
To counter-act what feels like a break-neck race to Easter, I long to pause and rest in ‘unforced rhythms of grace’; to walk with Jesus through these days and let his Spirit transform my DNA; to practice a new way of thinking by remembering my small story in the midst The Story; to be patient on the hard days before the Glory, even as I learn to be patient in the whole of an often Holy Saturday life.
We live in death. We see it all around.
We live in-between. We are residents of the Now but Not yet of the coming Kingdom. We live in that moment of baptism, under the water, the moment between death and resurrection.
Yet we also live resurrected in promise and hope, taking in that wonderful first gasp of earthly air as we rise from the baptismal water. One day we will take in that full sweet heavenly breath as we rise with Jesus.
I’m a rushing wind through life right now, a whirlwind of activity blowing through, a Tasmanian Devil of the old cartoons, and I’m not remembering to breathe earth’s air, and even less of heaven.
Last night at 3am, I woke to blessed silence and lit a candle and made some tea and journalled the Spirit’s prayer in me: Your life is wonderful–two awesome jobs and a wonderful community–but it is not sustainable. Pray and reflect, but use your night hours to sleep and learn to pause during the day.
Let Me be the wind and you breathe Me.
I’ve read enough books on prayer and gotten myself into this kind of pickle too many times to know that pausing in the midst of being a one-woman tornado of activity is easier said than done.
But I also know that our rich prayer tradition offers centuries of helps for just such a situation.
One way to pause, to mark the days and hours of Holy Week, or any week, is to join with the wider Church in the Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours. For centuries, the Office was the prayer of Benedictine monks and sisters, but then the Office moved into the lives of laypeople.
This week I will take a couple moments to pause and pray the Hours. Would you join me?
Here is a simple Liturgy of the Hours for Morning, Noon, and Compline prayer, starting with Palm Sunday evening. It offers a pattern based on the full Liturgy of the Hours, some simple chants, and scripture passages from The Message translation of the Bible.
I invite you to mark this week with me as different from the world’s calendar, to enter into the Now, but Not Yet, to pause and rest, and breathe in the wind of the Spirit as we are caught up in our Savior’s story.
***
If you want to print the PDF, select the file and choose booklet settings on your printer. It should print two pages horizontally on 8.5 x 11 paper in the proper order so you can fold and staple it. Or enjoy it as a digital prayer book on your phone or tablet.
Today’s post in the series Return to Our Senses in Lent is one of several reflections inspired by my new book Return to our Senses by Kimberlee Conway Ireton, author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year. you might also like to check out her other posts in the series:
The language of Prayer by Kimberlee Conway Ireton
This Place of Grace by Kimberlee Conway Ireton
Praying With Tears by Kimberlee Conway Ireton
Eight Ways of Looking at Water By Kimberlee Conway Ireton
In mid-February, my friend Susan gave me my first ever icon. It’s of Mary, the Theotokos, or God-bearer. The child Jesus leans against her cheek, one arm around her neck, the other resting on her chest, just above her left breast. His eyes look up at her in love; her eyes look out of the icon, at the viewer, at me.
I hung the icon on the east wall of my bedroom, above my writing desk, next to the window. Every afternoon, when I lie down on my bed with my two-year-old twins, to put them (and myself) down for a nap, I can see Mary looking at me with pity and compassion and love.
I need that kind of look these days. I’ve been worn out, worn down, just worn, like an old sheet that’s been washed way too many times. When I get this tired, the nasty voices in my head, which I can usually fight or keep at bay with prayer and Scripture recitation, get really loud and insistent, and in all their clamoring, I start to listen to them.
They say, Jesus never yelled at his disciples, and they bring to mind the way, earlier today, I raised my voice or lectured or even shamed one of my children.
They say things like, Jesus hung out with poor people and prostitutes. When was the last time you hung out with a poor person or a prostitute?
They say, There are people in this world who live on a dump. You, on the other hand, live in a two-bedroom house with running water and indoor plumbing in a nice neighborhood. Why can’t you just be grateful?
They don’t actually say that I’m a disappointment to Jesus or a bad Christian, but they imply it. They speak just enough truth to hook me, and I bite—and believe. And then they leave me floundering and gasping for air. So day after day, I fall exhausted on my bed, with one twin on either side of me and guilt and fear and shame circulating through my body like blood.
When I look up, I see Mary looking at me. Her gaze is one of infinite compassion and pity. She does not look like the kind of person who would say buck up and deal or quit complaining, you spoiled princess or you think your life is hard? Try living in a refugee camp.
No, she looks kind. So kind, in fact, that some afternoons, I find myself talking to her. I ask her if she ever got mad at Jesus, if she ever yelled at him, if she ever, in frustration, slapped him—all things I have done to my children, all things I am ashamed of. I ask her if it’s okay that I’m not feeding hungry people (unless my children count, and maybe they do, Mary?) or hanging out with prostitutes and criminals or even with people who aren’t at-home moms more or less like me.
She doesn’t answer. She just looks at me with pity and love.
When I tell Susan that I’ve started talking to the icon she gave me, she smiles. She says that I’m actually praying. She says, “An icon is a glimpse of heaven. You don’t talk to the icon. You talk through it, to the reality it points to, to Mary herself, who sits in heaven, praying to Jesus on our behalf.”
I was raised evangelical. We thought icons, if we thought about them at all, were just pictures. Susan, who was baptized in the Catholic Church, is far more comfortable with this whole praying-with-icons thing than I am. She continues, “In the Orthodox tradition, icons are a window through which we glimpse heaven, but through which Heaven can see us, too. Mary’s eyes of love in that icon are, in some mystical sense, really Mary’s eyes of love. She is really looking at you. The icon’s a glimpse of Truth, of the Really Real.”
I confess, despite (or perhaps because of) my evangelical upbringing, I love this idea. I love the thought that Mary, the mother of God; Mary, who raised the Son of God; Mary, whose mothering had eternal, cosmic consequences far beyond any that my own mothering might have; Mary who must therefore completely understand the heartache of being a mother, and also the joy and the frustration and the near-constant sense of failure—this is the woman whose loving eyes look into mine as I lie here on my bed
This afternoon, as I look at Mary, I think of my friend Jan. Jan is my mom’s age. She sort of adopted me when I moved to Seattle for college. On Sunday, Jan held me while I cried out much of the fear and frustration I’ve been carrying inside me these past weeks. She held me and rocked me like a child. She spoke words of reassurance and love. As she rocked me and held me and let me cry all over her sweater, Jan embodied the loving gaze of Mary, the loving gaze of Jesus. She became an icon of the love of God.
Now, looking at Mary, I see Jan, too. I see that if Jan, one of my fellow sinners, can look at me with love, without contempt, how much more must Jesus look at me with love? The contemptuous and venomous words that I’ve been listening to these past weeks aren’t the voice of God. God sounds like Jesus, with his arms of love outstretched on the cross. God sounds like Mary, with her eyes of love fixed on me as I lie here between my boys. God sounds like Jan, whispering prayers of grace and gratitude over me as I weep.
God looks at me with their eyes, eyes full of compassion and kindness and love. God speaks to me through their voices.
Jesus said, “The Father himself loves you.” (John 16:27) The Father himself loves me. The Father himself loves you. Amen. Amen.
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