God of unbounded joy,

God of undying love:

women went to a tomb

to tend to the crucified dead.

They came back the first preachers

of resurrection.

As we, like them,

return from the tomb of grief,

breathless with your risen life,

may we proclaim with unbridled joy

what the world is dying to hear:

that death is not the end;

that love remains what is most divine;

and that God continues to live

in the beating heart of our humanity. 

Amen

Corrymeela Community

Bach gives to Mary the mother of James the aria below from his Easter Oratorio. She’s running to the tomb with the other women in the cold light of morning, clutching spices for anointing Jesus’ body (Mark 16.1). She’s really singing to herself, to her anxious soul, wishing with all her heart that she was carrying laurel leaves to twist into a triumphant crown for Jesus, instead of myrrh for his burial.

In Julia Stankova’s striking painting, the women have reached the tomb and are looking inside in open-mouthed wonder. A seated angel is telling them not to be afraid and pointing to the place where Jesus’ body had been (Mark 16.6). The redundant grave clothes lie in a heap at his feet. A vigorous little tree with a single rosy apple grows nearby - Eden is restored! As James’ mother had wished in her aria, a garland of laurel would indeed have been more fitting than the women’s spice bottles, for “He has been raised; he is not here!”

Today’s prayer is from Corymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest community of reconciliation which takes a prophetic stand, living out its message in myriad ways. The prayer challenges us, as the angel challenged the women, to ‘go and tell’.  What are we going to do with today’s message of ‘unbridled joy’? How might we welcome resurrection more boldly into our own lives? How might we reveal to others the ‘undying love’ that is God?

God of all our growing,

take our roots down deep

in the long, dark winter season of our grief.

Nurture the resurrection life in us,

in the secret places of the soil,

in the barren, frozen earth, underground,

where no eye can see.

Send your Spirit where the cold season rages

and speak to us the promise of spring.

Nicola Slee

This prayer is from Easter Garden in which Nicola Slee, finding in the rhythms of the seasons a fertile image of God’s constantly transformative work, explores the connections between two Marys in two gardens - Mary Lennox, the sad little orphan in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Mary Magdalene in the garden of Jesus’ burial.

It is winter when Mary Lennox first discovers her ‘secret’ garden. It seems as miserable and lifeless as she is. In the keening of Vivaldi’s solo violin below (lamenting the winter and longing for spring, while other strings evoke the frozen wastes of a shivering world), we hear the soundscape of Mary’s own lament and longing.

She doesn’t realise that it’s in darkness that new life begins, that seeds and roots lie hidden underground, waiting for their moment. Nor, today, does Mary Magdalene know that buried in the dark of the tomb is much more than a crucified human body. Broken and bereft, she reels with despair.

On Holy Saturday, our job is to reel with her. To wait with the crucified one but also with all that is dead in ourselves. To eyeball the metaphorical ‘winter’ which seals us off from ‘spring’. To hold in the dark of the tomb our own despair, and as much of the world’s despair as we can bear to grasp. And there, to let God ‘nurture the resurrection life in us.’

Father forgive them,

for they know not

what they do.

Luke 23.34

This image of crucifixion is undeniably angular. Influenced in part by Cubism, the Iranian artist Houshang Pezeshknia (1917-1972) offers unyielding, geometric lines and jagged edges to convey the human cruelty behind the suspension of a body on wood by nails. Even the cliffs and clouds have sharp corners.

There is a similar jagged quality to the first of James MacMillan’s “Seven Last Words from the Cross” (music below, words here).  It is not easy listening. Above chords charged with cosmic lament, rising sopranos sing Jesus’ prayer above. Then, as the music swells, we hear the crowds taunting Jesus, using words with which, only a few days before, they’d fêted him.  An anguished violin becomes increasingly agitated, tortured. The sopranos continue as the voice of Jesus, ending the piece utterly alone.

The spiky torment of both music and painting underlines the astonishing nature of Jesus’ words inviting God’s forgiveness: something tender, holy, redeeming is held against the brutality. “Forgiveness is truly not the easy option,” writes Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani. “It is costly, messy and painful but it does open up the way of life.” And she should know. Soon after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, as part of the persecution waged there against the Anglican Church of which her father was Bishop, her brother Bahram was murdered. At his funeral, an extraordinary prayer written by Guli’s father was read in the original Persian. It has become known as The Forgiveness Prayer.

Glory to God for the child born among us,

a gift to be nurtured and cared for,

a guest in a world of toil and tears

bringing hopefulness, life through brokenness.

May we, as on Emmaus Road,

recognise him still

in smell of baking bread, in fruits of love.

For we have a dying and a rising friend

and his sap is in us.

Sarah Middleton © TMCP 2004

(used with permission)

Jyoti Sahi: Dalit Madonna, from the Methodist Modern Art Collection © TMCP. Used with permission.

This painting by the Anglo-Indian artist Jyoti Sahi (b.1944) is called The Dalit Madonna. Its image of mother encircling unborn child with the round curves of her body deliberately echoes an iconic Indian symbol – the grinding stone. Grain is thrown into the hollow of a ‘Mother Stone’ before a smaller ‘Baby Stone’ is rotated repeatedly around it, grinding, milling flour. Much else in the painting speaks of grain. Great sheaves of wheat curve round the woman; in her billowing trousers we see ears of corn; the sickle moon hints at harvest. 

‘Dalit’ means ‘broken’. This ‘Dalit Madonna’ will be broken when she’s separated from her child by birth but then later, much more savagely by death. But just as there can be no bread without breaking down grain into flour, Sahi signals the new life made possible through this brokenness of mother and son, new life underlined by Sarah Middleton in her accompanying prayer.

The same brokenness also comes to life in the shared meal we celebrate on this Maundy Thursday. As Jesus breaks bread at the Last Supper, he looks ahead to his brokenness on the cross and gives us a way of being fed by him, offers us the broken bread of himself in which ‘all our hungers are satisfied’.

Listen below to Pange Lingua, an ancient hymn of the church in honour of “these holy mysteries”. The plainsong’s timeless beauty reflects the enduring nature of today’s life-giving gift.

Teach me to accept other people

with love, as you do.

Help me to take other people

as they are

and never be cruel or unkind

- whatever they look like.

Amen

Wendy Beckett

In A Child’s Book of Prayer in Art, Sr Wendy Beckett teamed her prayer above with this late 15th-century painting by Ghirlandaio.  It’s a portrait of an old man and his nipote, the Italian word probably translating here as ‘grandson’. Despite the carbuncles around his grandfather’s nose, which might repel another child, this one comes close. He places his hand trustingly on the old man’s chest and looks into the disfigured face long and lovingly. He sees beyond the blemishes.

There’s a vulnerability about the grandfather but, sensing this unconditional acceptance, he does not turn away in embarrassment. He looks down gently and gratefully. The two feel safe with each other. It’s a healing moment, a moment which teaches us about God’s unconditional acceptance of us, disfigured as we are in so many different ways. And Sr Wendy’s prayer invites us to mirror this divine way of loving by accepting others, warts and all. 

The aria below from Handel’s Messiah sets words from Isaiah 53: He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (3a). The biblical text continues by describing this figure as ‘one from whom others hide their faces’ (3b). Since the crucifixion, Christians have seen in Isaiah’s words something of Jesus’ own ‘Passion of Disfigurement’. We are now just days away from re-living it, days away from the ‘smiting’, ‘spitting’ and ‘shame’ (Isaiah 50.6) of the aria’s central section.  

Gracious God,

be with all those

who struggle today with symptoms

of dementia in its many forms;

mood changes,

memory lapses,

confusion,

helplessness

and isolation.

May they know in their hearts

your comforting embrace

amid their daily frustrations,

and continue to realise,

as names and memories fade,

that they are still loved by family,

friends, and especially by you.

Amen

John Birch

Covid has taught us about the perils of isolation. The importance of our connection with each other has been underlined as never before. But, pandemic or not, people become isolated for all sorts of reasons.  And isolation can be frightening. As someone newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s writes, “Isolation from others is the biggest fear I have”.

The figure in this photo seeks connection with the world beyond her room by gazing through her window.  Is she isolated because she lives with dementia? If so, John Birch holds her before God in today’s prayer. He prays that, amidst all the frustrations, she’ll know herself loved by family, friends and, especially, by God.

Like John Birch’s prayer, Phil Coulter’s song below ends with a powerful statement about love. The song, reflecting on his own experience of a son living with Down’s Syndrome, describes his golden-haired child standing alone and apart as other children play together. He laments this ‘Passion of Isolation’. ‘Scorn not his simplicity,’ he urges, ‘but rather try to love him all the more’.

In the next few days, we’ll find an increasingly isolated Jesus alone in Gethsemane as his friends sleep. We’ll watch as he’s denied by Peter, scorned by soldiers, and even (he feels) forsaken by God. With every step towards death, he becomes more and more cut off from others. And there’s something about this utter aloneness which does indeed make us love him all the more.

Jesus of the sheathed sword,

in your name,

many swords have been used

and many people have perished.

Speak to us, teach us,

again and again,

that violence begets violence.

Teach us. Again and again.

Over and over.

Because we keep forgetting

and we need to keep

remembering.

Over and over.

Amen

Padraig O’Tuama

This prayer fast-tracks us to Gethsemane. An armed mob had arrived and, once the betrayer’s kiss had been planted on Jesus’s cheek, muscled in. Outraged by Jesus’ arrest, one of those with him (John says it was Peter), attacked the High Priest’s slave with a sword - the moment captured in Guérard’s painting of 1520. But Jesus admonished his impetuous friend: “Put your sword back in its place,” he said, “for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt 26.52). In Padraig O’Tuama’s prayer, this teaching that ‘violence begets violence’ is underscored ‘over and over’.

We don’t have to look far to see the truth of Jesus’ words. Those who unjustifiably initiate aggression by lifting the sword, or aiming the missile, or ramming the tank, inevitably incite a justifiable, self-defending counter-aggression, a tidal wave of violence gathering pace.

Jesus’ response to aggression was unusual. He silently endured this ‘Passion of Violence’. He would not be goaded. He went willingly to the cross. He prayed, “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Psalm 31.5).

Soon after war broke out, Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi invited Christians to join Jews in praying Psalm 31. Now, their country torn apart, they continue to pray it in basements and bomb-shelters. Others have turned to a prayer by the Ukrainian composer, Valentyn Silvestrov (b. Kyiv 1937). It’s a prayer with the simplest words, repeated over and over: Bozhe, Ukrayinu khrany or Lord, save the Ukraine.

Sanctus

Holy, holy, holy,

Lord God of hosts.

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Benedictus

Blessed is he

who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

Sanctus and Benedictus (Latin)

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus

Dominus Deus Sabaoth.

Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna in excelsis.

We hear these words each time we gather to break bread. The first two lines of the Sanctus draw on Isaiah’s vision of God attended by angels who sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’ (6.3). Then, with the word ‘Hosanna’, we are catapulted to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Mk 11.1-11). It is the word of Palm Sunday.

On the only other occasion it’s found in the Bible - at Psalm 118.25 – ‘hosanna’ is a cry for help. But that cry was answered almost before it was out of the psalmist’s mouth with the exclamation, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ (v26). So the meaning of ‘Hosanna’ gradually changed from a cry for help to a shout of joyous relief. That’s what we hear from those crowds, oppressed by Roman occupation, on the first Palm Sunday. In Jesus, the ‘blessed’ one coming ‘in the name of the Lord’, they recognise their hope and salvation. At the bottom of Duccio’s painting (left), Jerusalem’s door is wide open for him at last.

After an awed and serene Sanctus, we hear a carefree joy in the Benedictus from Bob Chilcott’s Little Jazz Mass. No wonder these words belong now at the heart of the celebration at which the same ‘blessed’ one comes to us in bread and wine. Awed and joyous ourselves, we open the doors of our lives to welcome him in.

God, I cry to you in the early morning,

help me to pray and to gather my thoughts:

I cannot do it alone.

It is dark inside me, but you do not leave me.

I am timid, but with you is my help.

I am anxious, but with you is peace.

There is bitterness inside me, 

but with you is patience.

I do not understand your ways, 

but you know the right way for me.

Lord Jesus Christ,

you were poor and miserable, 

caught and abandoned like me.

You know all the sorrow of humanity.

You stay with me, when nobody stays with me.

You never forget me, and you search for me.

You want me to recognise you and turn to you.

Lord, I hear your call and follow.

Help me.

This prayer was written in Cell 93 at Tegel Prison, North Berlin, pictured above. The Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote it there for his fellow prisoners. Three years earlier, on the day Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer had spoken out publicly against the tyranny overtaking Germany and spent the next few years struggling to be true to his faith while resisting the Nazi regime in every possible way. It could not tolerate his resistance. Imprisoned from 1943, he was eventually tried for treason and hanged on 9 April 1945 just two weeks before the war ended.

In profoundly inspiring ways, Bonhoeffer’s life and death reveal the cost of discipleship and it’s especially moving to be marking his readiness to ‘take up his own cross’ (Luke 9.23) as we stand on Holy Week’s threshold. Sometime this week, you may like to spend an hour watching the recording of Tenebrae: The Passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Through word and symbol, silence and music, this is a powerful interweaving of the Passion of Christ with Bonhoeffer’s own.

“The deep meaning of the cross of Christ,” he once said, “is that there is no suffering on earth that is not borne by God.” Praying his prayer today, we can hold in its humanity and honesty, and in the depth of its trust, all who are currently in prison for challenging inhumane regimes.

O God, who brought us to birth

and in whose arms we die:

in our grief and shock

contain and comfort us;

embrace us with your love,

give us hope in our confusion,

and grace to let go into new life,

through Jesus Christ,

Amen

Janet Morley

This prayer from Janet Morley’s 1988 collection All Desires Known is headed ‘At a funeral’ and has since found its way into Common Worship’s ‘Pastoral Services’. The first two lines assure us that God midwifes us at both birth and death, that we are cradled by divine arms through both these astonishing transitions. But the prayer in its entirety also gives us a glimpse of how the ‘Passion of Grief’ might feel. It cites, for example, the initial ‘shock’ which can catapult us to ‘confusion’, flailing about in unknown emotional territory, in need of that holy embrace again to ‘contain and comfort us’.  

In this bronze, titled Lament, Kathe Kollwitz has sculpted herself. The date of composition, 1938-40, speaks volumes. What she is showing here is her grief at the intolerable suffering going on around her in Hitler’s Germany and her attempts to contain that grief. Eyes tight shut, she can bear to look no longer: a hand is clamped across her mouth to prevent an anguished sob escaping. Her own son had died in Flanders during the first world war…

In the searingly beautiful aria below from A German Requiem, Brahms set three different biblical passages. Like Morley’s closing lines, they take us beyond grief to hope, to something new. Near the end, we hear Elizabeth Watts, a former chorister of Norwich Cathedral, sing God’s words to a grieving people: “I will console you as a mother consoles her child.”

O God,

I am here.

You are here.

Amen.

Debie Thomas

The pallid child in this painting is Edvard Munch’s sister who died at 15 of tuberculosis. Something about the way Munch has streaked the paint suggests that it too is weeping, as desolate with the Passion of Despair as the bowed figure by the bed.

Debie Thomas is an Episcopalian priest who understands such despair. Her daughter’s teens have been marked by anorexia, clinical depression, social anxiety, self-harming and suicidal thoughts. Debie coaxes smoothies down her daughter’s throat when she won’t eat, bandages her arms when she finds them cut, holds her tight in the depths of depression, watches helplessly as anxiety rules her young life.

On good days, Debie also prays for her daughter and tells her repeatedly that God loves her. But on days when she is herself defeated by the chaos that is their family life and by the agony of watching her beloved child suffer, she resorts to the words above.  “For months, this was the only prayer I could pray”, she writes. “I couldn’t say ‘thank you’ and mean it. I couldn’t say ‘help’ because I was tired of asking for help. The only honest prayer I could make was one of bare-bones presence, mine and God’s.”

Debie’s prayer, formed in despair, nonetheless points to God’s presence with her in that despair.  Like her prayer, Rachmaninov’s ‘song’ too is short, spare, bleak but beautiful. In some ways, they both communicate all that needs to be said.

Let the healing start.

May it begin in the blood

and flood every cell with light.

May it infect the heart.

(Let the healing start.)

May it come as one comforts

a newborn at midnight

the wild shocking eye closing.

(Let it come.) Let it start

now as we sit here waiting

and talking through days

of colour and rain.

May it infect the heart

and save it. May it lead us

into light. (We are open.)

Let the healing start.

Anthony Wilson (b.1963)

Early in Mark’s gospel (1.40), a man with leprosy approaches Jesus. We see him in this Byzantine mosaic, covered in sores. “If you want to,” he says, “you can make me clean”. And Jesus responds: “I do want to. Be clean.” The interchange could not be simpler. The man courageously lays bare his need: Jesus’ reply hold’s heaven’s longing for healing. 

The poet Antony Wilson wrote the prayer above after successful treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He looks back at his sick self as a baby open-eyed with fright in the dark, his words aching with longing for the comfort which healing would bring. In fact, the refrain ‘Let the healing start’, shapes the whole prayer, a short repeatable mantra which characterised Wilson’s own ‘Passion of Sickness’.

Taking us on an imaginary tour of his body, he pictures healing ‘flooding’ every one of his diseased blood cells ‘with light’ and ‘infecting’ too (in the sense here of ‘affecting’), his heart. He ventures to play his part in his healing by visualising it, laying himself completely bare before the God who says, “I do want to. Be clean.” He is ready and waiting. Open to whatever will be.  

Leonard Cohen’s song, Come Healing, though more enigmatic, is as yearning and invitational as Wilson’s prayer. Both men, fully aware that healing does not always come, nonetheless encourage us to invite it, to imagine it, to be open to it.

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress,

And when I my sins confess,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

When I lie within my bed,

Sick in heart and sick in head,

And with doubts discomforted,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

When the house doth sigh and weep,

And the world is drown'd in sleep,

Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

During the English Civil War, Robert Herrick, priest and poet, was ejected from his Devon parish and forced to rely on friends and family until reinstated fifteen years later. Was this what he meant by “the hour of (his) distress”? In these first three verses of his Litany to the Holy Spirit, he certainly describes symptoms consonant with such trauma and turbulence – disturbed thoughts, sickness of heart and mind, doubt, sleeplessness, a feeling that the very house weeps with him in the dead of night. From them all he prays for release: “Sweet Spirit comfort me”.

In our own time, pandemic, climate emergency and a new war in Europe have forced humanity’s mental health high up the global agenda. Herrick’s swirling maelstrom of emotions feels familiar to many. Familiar too the angst we see in Edvard Munch’s iconic 1893 painting. Munch, walking at sunset near Oslo under blood-red clouds, had sensed an "infinite shriek passing through nature". Head held despairingly in hands, the painting’s figure emits a silent (yet somehow reverberating) scream from a gaping mouth.

Munch paints and Herrick writes the ‘Passion of Mental Anguish’, a condition of distressed anxiety belonging to the human condition. But the composer Peter Hurford (1930-2019) takes us beyond this anguish. With his setting of Herrick’s prayer, we find ourselves in a place of calm and consolation, the simple serenity of his composition already ushering in the Spirit’s comfort.

Where are you God?

Can you reach through this fog

that envelops me?

Can you permeate the stink

and bring me back from the brink?

You see, I’m drowning in my addiction,

succumbing to my affliction.

Am I still under your jurisdiction?

Or have I ‘sinned’ myself out?

Where are you God?

Are you hiding?

No, you are.

I’m abiding.

Eira Kitchen

This ‘Prayer of an Alcoholic Mother’ has a surprise twist at its end. Without warning, the voice changes. The ‘alcoholic mother’, having asked with bitterness whether God is ‘hiding’, receives an answer.  “No, you are,” retorts the divine voice. “I’m abiding.”

God’s not going anywhere! The ‘fog’ and the ‘stink’ of this ‘drowning’, would put many off. Powerless in the face of damage pouring from the bottle into every sphere of life, others might give up.  Not the divine one, affirms this prayer. God is ‘abiding’ - steadfastly, enduringly present in this woman’s ‘Passion of Addiction’.  

In the 15th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus uses the verb ‘abide’ eleven times in ten verses. He’s talking about his relationship with his disciples, with us: “Abide in me as I abide in you… I am the Vine and you are the branches,” he says (vs 4,5). Only with this mutual abiding will the grapes come.

We hear this intimate relationship in Arvo Pärt’s I Am the True Vine, composed for Norwich Cathedral’s 900th anniversary in 1996. Inspired by the vine metaphor, an intriguing sound pattern is created as John’s text is sung - words and phrases begun by one voice and completed seamlessly by another. And, with all that plump and plentiful fruit pushing through the leaves in her delicate painting The Vine (also inspired by John 15), Dee Beggarly spotlights the link between God’s abiding and our flourishing, addict or not.

Our Father in heaven,

you are also at home in the air, soil,

in the forests and oceans:

hallowed be your name.

By the care we take of your creation,

may your kingdom come.

All that you see is good.

Your will be done on earth as in heaven -

your will to till and to care.

Give us today our daily bread,

that all may have enough

to live life in fullness.

Forgive us our sins -

our greed, our exploitation,

our lack of concern for other species

and for future generations -

as we forgive those who sin against us

by reconciliation with justice and peace.

Lead us not into temptation,

the temptation to equate

dominion with exploitation,  

and deliver us from evil,

the evil of destroying your gift of creation.

For the kingdom,

the power and the glory are yours

- such things do not belong to us -

now and for ever,

Amen.

So be it.

(source unknown)

Passiontide, when we try to enter with Jesus into his ‘passion’ (suffering), begins today. The cross is in sight. But, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Christ plays in ten thousand places”. In other words, Jesus is crucified not just on Golgotha but anywhere where cruel, selfish, thoughtless choices lead to suffering. Over the next few days, we’ll explore some of the contexts in which he enters into humanity’s suffering, but today, with the help of this Lord’s Prayer for a time of environmental crisis, we gaze sadly at the ‘passion’ of the natural world.

We see the ‘Passion of Environmental Crisis’ in this photo. Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems but in 2018 the rising temperatures and prolonged drought of California’s changing climate led to its deadliest wildfires ever. This raging inferno swallowed up a football field of forest every second. Within hours it razed this town to the ground. Ironically, it was called ‘Paradise’.

In 2016, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi (b.1955) collaborated with Greenpeace in a project to highlight the plight of the Arctic where higher-than-usual temperatures are melting ice at scarily rapid rates, threatening biodiversity and raising sea levels elsewhere in the world. In his ‘Elegy for the Arctic’ we hear the ‘Passion of Environmental Crisis’. Notes from Einaudi’s piano drip insistently like melting water while an ice fall crashes into the sea only yards from where he’s playing.

Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,

for all the benefits thou hast given me,

for all the pains and insults

thou hast borne for me.

O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,

may I know thee more clearly,

love thee more dearly,

and follow thee more nearly,

day by day.

On this day in 1253, Bishop Richard of Chichester, learned and loving, was in Dover preaching about the Crusades. But he became seriously ill there and his clergy gathered anxiously round his bed. It was then that he prayed the prayer above. He first acknowledged with gratitude the ‘benefits’ and ‘pains’ of Christ’s Passion. Then, with moving simplicity, he called Jesus his ‘friend’ and ‘brother’, a direct and intimate approach captured in the icon above which shows him conversing face-to-face with his Lord. He died the next day.

Bishop Richard prayed his dying words in Latin but thanks to a skilful translator (possibly Cecil Headlam in 1898), it is very memorable in English, a rhyming trio of words - ‘clearly’, ‘dearly’, ‘nearly’ – helping to lodge the prayer in heart and mind. Richard would probably be surprised to know how popular his prayer has become but even more surprised to know that, over 700 years after his death, it inspired a beautiful song - Day by Day – which featured in a blockbuster musical called Godspell.

On the stage, a lone disciple sang to the listening Jesus. Then, other disciples joined in. Just as the dying bishop had done, they asked Jesus that they might know him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly. On the threshold of Passiontide, it’s the perfect prayer for us too.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt,

rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing,

put me to suffering.

Let me be employed for thee

or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee

or brought low for thee.

Let me be full,

let me be empty.

Let me have all things,

let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen

Adapting wording already in existence, John Wesley published this prayer in 1780. It’s a central plank of the annual Covenant Service which Methodists often hold at Watchnight Services marking the turn of the calendar year, or perhaps on the first Sunday after that. The prayer speaks powerfully into that moment of new beginnings and resolutions but seems equally apt as we prepare to enter Passiontide, for it cannot fail to remind us of Jesus’ own prayer in Gethsemane: “Father … remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” Each line of the Covenant Prayer echoes this handing over of self, this relinquishing of control, this streamlining one’s own longings in line with the longings of God. It is a notoriously testing prayer to pray. It is also regarded as a jewel of Methodism and one of its most distinctive gifts to the wider Church.

Wesley’s simple phrases burn with the fire of love and culminate in a declaration of mutual belonging: “Thou art mine and I am thine”.  In fact, there are also echoes here of marriage vows, of entering into a covenant with a beloved one “for better for worse; for richer for poorer; in sickness or in health”. You can hear something of that love in the way the prayer is sung below and, in its accompanying video, we come across a handful of inspiring figures whose lives have visibly embodied it.

Bring us, O Lord God,

at our last awakening,

into the house

and gate of heaven,

to enter into that gate

and dwell in that house,

where there shall be

no darkness nor dazzling,

but one equal light;

no noise nor silence,

but one equal music;

no fears nor hopes,

but one equal possession;

no ends nor beginnings,

but one equal eternity;

in the habitations of thy glory

and dominion 

world without end.

Amen

John Donne

These are words from a sermon by John Donne, priest and poet, who died on this day in 1631. They have been shaped into a prayer which, in our own day, is often used at funerals. On such occasions, we’re already alive to our own mortality, tingling with the inevitability of our own funeral. If tempted to look towards it with dread, however, Donne’s inspired use of the word ‘awakening’ brings us to our senses. He’s speaking of dying but flips right over the common euphemism which describes it as ‘falling asleep’. Far from being a passive sinking into eternal oblivion, the dying of which Donne speaks is ‘our last awakening’.

And then, in the prayer’s central, magisterial lines, he describes what we will find when we have awoken to God that final time. We will no longer be pushed and pulled between opposites such as darkness and dazzling, noise and silence, fears and hopes, ends and beginnings. Instead, all struggle will cease. We will be free of agitation. In ‘the house and gate of heaven’ we will find nothing but rest and balance, composure and constancy, harmony, equanimity.

Donne gives us a glimpse of heaven through his sublime words: William Harris reveals even more of its wonder by setting these words for double choir.  The combination of words and music shimmers with holy serenity. Together the two men draw us right into the prayer’s ‘one equal music’.

Lead me from death to life,

from falsehood to truth;

lead me from despair to hope,

from fear to trust;

lead me from hate to love,

from war to peace.

Let peace fill our heart,

our world, our universe.

This Universal Prayer for Peace is an adaptation of a famous mantra in the Hindu Upanishads, written in Sanskrit between 800–200 BC. It appeared in the form used here towards the end of the 20th century when Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk based in the UK, crafted a version for people of all faiths and of none. The prayer was first used in public by Mother (now ‘Saint’) Teresa while speaking at St James’ Piccadilly in July 1981. And now, at noon every day, diverse communities gather world-wide to pray it, a wave of prayerful peace-longing rippling daily around the globe.

Interestingly, despite the emphasis on the prayer’s universality, the word ‘our’ doesn’t appear until the last sentence. Before that, it’s all singular, individual.  Perhaps there’s a resonance here with other words which have their roots in India: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

In 1936, Vaughan Williams wrote his cantata Dona Nobis Pacem in response to the storm clouds of war once again gathering across Europe. The opening movement (the first 4 minutes of the cantata below) sets these words: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem (Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace). Even as the soprano sings her final, soft, low ‘pacem’, beating drums signal war’s advance. In our own time, praying with others for the world’s peace has rarely felt so vital.

Lord Jesus,

when you were a guest at meals,

amazing things happened –

water became wine,

the hungry were fed,

lost souls came home.

Come now and be our guest,

with us around this table,

and, by your presence,

make this home

a place of infinite grace,

a place of new possibility,

full of the Life that is you.

Amen

Neil Paynter (adapted)

Graces for praying at mealtimes come in all shapes and sizes – spoken, sung, silent; reflective, amusing, challenging. This one refers to familiar gospel-meals – a wedding banquet at Cana, a bread and fish picnic, an eyebrow-raising visit to a despised tax collector used to loathing and loneliness. At each, the presence of Jesus brought complete transformation. In the same way that he’s being invited to be seated for the simple family meal in Fritz von Uhde’s thought-provoking painting, today’s prayer asks that Jesus will join those about to eat wherever the prayer is being prayed.

And how might he transform us? Perhaps by filling us with peace after a torrid day. Perhaps in the loving-kindness between those at table together. Perhaps in grateful hearts spilling out in compassion for the hungry. Perhaps in welcoming others to the meal… Saying Grace can be risky.

Many thousands of homes are currently preparing to welcome Ukrainian guests not just around their tables but in their spare rooms too. In showing hospitality to strangers, “some have entertained angels without knowing it,” we read in Hebrews (13.2), and Jesus made it crystal clear that when we welcome a stranger, we welcome him (Mt 25. 31-46). Sharing our table in this way is a sacred act. As v3 of Marty Haugen’s hymn below makes clear, it mirrors the radical welcome Jesus himself offers when he becomes the host at the meal of all meals.