This prayer on "Embracing Joy and Sorrow", was recently shared with me by one of my sisters. It has been so timely and has been providing me with somewhat of a template to sift through a myriad of emotions.
Do not be distant, O Lord,
lest I find this burden of loss too heavy,
and shrink from the necessary experience of my grief.
Do not be distant,
O Lord, lest I become so mired in yesterday’s hurts,
that I miss entirely
the living gifts this day might hold.
Let me neither ignore my pain,
pretending all is okay when it isn’t,
nor coddle and magnify my pain,
so that I dull my capacity
to experience all that remains good in this life.
For joy that denies sorrow
is neither hard-won,
nor true, nor eternal.
It is not real joy at all.
And sorrow that refuses to make space
for the return of joy and hope,
in the end becomes nothing more than a temple
for the worship of my own woundedness.
So, give me strength, O God,
to feel this grief deeply,
never to hide my heart from it.
And give me also hope enough
to remain open to surprising encounters with joy,
as one on a woodland path might stumble suddenly
into dapplings of golden light.
Amidst the pain that lades these days,
give me courage,
O Lord; courage to live them fully,
to love and to allow myself to be loved,
to remember, grieve, and honor what was,
to live with thanksgiving in what is,
and to invest in the hope of what will be.
Be at work gilding these long heartbreaks
with the advent of new joys,
good friendships,
true fellowships, unexpected delights.
Remind me again and again of your goodness,
your presence, your promises.
For this is who we are: a people of The Promise—
a people shaped in the image of the God
whose very being generates all joy in the universe,
yet who also weeps and grieves its brokenness.
So we, your children,
are also at liberty to lament our losses,
even as we simultaneously rejoice
in the hope of their coming restoration.
Let me learn now, O Lord,
to do this as naturally as the inhale and exhale
of a single breath:
To breathe out sorrow,
to breathe in joy.
To breathe out lament,
to breathe in hope.
To breathe out pain,
to breathe in comfort.
To breathe out sorrow,
to breathe in joy.
In one hand I grasp the burden of my grief,
while with the other I reach for
the hope of grief ’s redemption.
And here, between the tension of the two,
between what was and what will be,
in the very is of now,
let my heart be
surprised by,
shaped by,
warmed by,
remade by,
the same joy that forever wells within
and radiates from your heart, O God.
Amen.
Liturgy "Embracing Joy and Sorrow"
"Every Moment Holy"
Douglas McKelvey
