In you, Father all-mighty,

we have our preservation and our bliss.

In you, Christ,

we have our restoring and our saving.

You are our mother, brother, and Saviour.

In you, our Lord the Holy Spirit,

is marvellous and plenteous grace.

You are our clothing;

for love you wrap us and embrace us.

You are our maker, our lover, our keeper.

Teach us to believe that by your grace

all shall be well, and all shall be well,

and all manner of thing shall be well.

“Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I should not tell you about the goodness of God?” So challenged Julian of Norwich who is thought to be the first woman to write a book in English – a wonderful thing to celebrate on this International Women’s Day. Today’s prayer is formed from phrases in her spiritual classic, Revelations of Divine Love, each delighting in God’s tender embrace, enfolding, enduring.  We’ve no details about Julian’s education but her writings reveal familiarity with English and Latin works and she was adept at quoting from the Bible.

More than six centuries later, plenty of girls across the world - currently 130 million in fact – are denied education. A decade ago, Malala Yousafzai, then 15, was shot for challenging the Taliban’s directive that school was for boys only. But though critically injured, she was not silenced. “I believed in my strength,” she says. “I believed I would leave hospital and run like a wolf, fly like an eagle.” She’s now an activist for girls’ education globally and the youngest Nobel laureate ever.

Like Malala, Julian too had been close to death. Yet out of that experience and her visions of the crucified Christ at that time, she was able to say, “All shall be well”. As you listen to this deep and mysterious phrase being sung, you’ll be taken round the church to which she was attached as an anchoress.

Lord God

you have called your servants

to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,

by paths as yet untrodden,

through perils unknown.

Give us faith to go out with good courage,

not knowing where we go,

but only that your hand is leading us

and your love supporting us;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

from the Lutheran Book of Worship

(Augsburg,1978)

This Lutheran prayer is perfect as we set out on another Lenten journey, especially as we do so in a world which seems uncertain in so many ways. Fears and anxieties caused by pandemic, environmental crisis and political instability, ripple ominously across the globe. Yet it is to serve this world that God has called us. And ‘called’ is the first word which the American composer J. Aaron McDermid (b.1974) chooses to highlight in the opening phrase of his lovely setting of this prayer. The voices lift as they sing it, suspended on the word so we cannot fail to notice it. But as well as shining a light on our calling, the first part of the prayer faces up squarely to the challenge of the task: its ending is unclear, the paths towards it ‘as yet untrodden’, traversing ‘perils unknown’.

Then, into all this unknowing, a soprano voice rises up, lone and clear. “Give us faith,” she sings – not once but twice, and the other voices start to gather around her, growing in energy, heartened by her cry for faith, by its implicit invitation to trust. The piece builds and builds until it is exultant in its confidence that however much is unknown, God’s loving, supporting presence cannot be doubted.

At last the singers quieten. They come back to earth, as it were, after glorying in God’s abiding. Grounded, settled and reassured, they close the prayer “through Jesus Christ our Lord”.

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name;

thy kingdom come;

thy will be done;

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation;

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

the power and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen

“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples have just said to Jesus (Luke 11.1). And in this painting by James Tissot (The Lord’s Prayer, c1890), Jesus is in full flight, imparting words precious now to Christians of all traditions, many of whom know them by heart.  “When you pray, say this,” Jesus had begun. And so we do. The Lord’s Prayer has a place in every Anglican act of worship, and it offers a pattern for other prayer - acknowledging God’s holiness, praying for the coming of the Kingdom, for daily needs to be met, for forgiveness and protection.

It also stresses our togetherness – it’s ‘Our Father’, not ‘My Father’! None of us has exclusive access! In fact, the words ‘our’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ occur no less than nine times. In Tissot’s painting, Jesus seems to be teaching his friends to hold out their hands as they pray - a bodily sign, maybe, of becoming more open not just to God but to each other, for every single human being is parented lovingly by the one to whom the prayer is addressed. No surprise then that it’s been translated into just about every language under the sun. God’s inclusion has no limits and experiencing the Lord’s Prayer in other languages can be humbling, levelling. It’s especially moving at the moment to listen to it in Ukrainian. You might also like to hear Duruflé’s gentle setting in French.

Kyrie Eleison

(Lord have mercy)

Just hours after Russia began its military attack on Ukraine, a US journalist reported something she’d seen which had moved her greatly.  It took place early in the morning in the middle of an open square in the Ukrainian city, Kharkiv. In the bitter cold, a little group of people knelt on the stone paving slabs to pray. As this photo was taken, explosions were ricocheting across their city.

Watching helplessly as war once more comes to Europe, we too turn to prayer. And what better prayer to pray than one especially deeply embedded in the Christian East - in both Ukraine, then, and Russia. But the prayer as a three-fold petition is familiar to Christians across the globe. How could it not be? It is a cry for the mercy of God which we all need. Ky-ri-é El-é-i-son, it begins in Greek, Lord have mercy. And then often, Christ-é El-é-i-son (Christ have mercy) before repeating Ky-ri-é El-é-i-son.

As you pray for God’s transformational mercy both upon the suffering people of Ukraine and upon their warmongering oppressor, you might like to sing this simple Ukrainian setting of the Kyrie yourself. Or let the 16th-century setting below lead you into prayer. It is sung by Kyiv Chamber Choir. Above hauntingly resonant basses, the soloist’s soulful voice rises. It is a lamentation as well as a longing for mercy.

God of the past, the present and the future,

we thank you that you love us

faithfully and uniquely.

You loved us

before we knew anything about you:

you care for us in every moment of our lives;

you know our deepest thoughts,

our highest hopes

and our greatest fears:

you know the best and the worst in us,

and still you love us.

Image for World Day of Prayer 2022

This is the first part of a prayer which, today, will be prayed all over the globe as Christians gather for this year’s World Day of Prayer. (If you hadn’t already planned to take part, there’s probably a church near you holding the specially written service where you’d be very welcome.) The theme this year is “I know the plans I have for you” (Jer 29.11). 

The prayer above picks up this idea of God’s deep and complete knowledge of us by drawing explicitly on some key ideas from Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me,” that psalm begins, “you discern my thoughts from afar.” There need be no fear or pretence in this relationship – we are known through and through. And still treasured.

Regarding the past, it was God “who knit me together in my mother’s womb” (v13). As regards the present, “Where can I flee from your presence?” (v7) - God is with us come what may for “darkness is as light to you” (v12). And the future? “In your book were written all the days that were formed for me when none of them as yet existed” (v16).

The contemporary composer Bernadette Farrell has fashioned a lovely hymn from this psalm. Listen below! Today’s prayer, Farrell’s hymn and the psalm on which they both draw all underline with wonderment that from conception onwards, God is inescapably, unconditionally with us.

Compassionate Creator,

we too often ignore the cries

and suffering of your creatures.

As we acknowledge that one fifth of species

is under threat or endangered with extinction,

we feel tremendous sorrow.

We lament what we have done,

or what we have failed to do.

As we remember that we, too,

are part of your creation,

vulnerable and interdependent,

may we reach out to our fellow creatures

who are struggling for survival.

Creation Justice USA (adapted)

The Palestine mountain gazelle pictured here is now classified as an endangered species. Across Israel it’s legally protected but, with numbers daily diminishing due to poachers, feral dogs and habitat degradation, the future looks bleak. The largest numbers of mountain gazelles remain in the Golan Heights and in Galilee where Jesus would have known them. He would also have encountered them in the dry desert-like conditions of the Judaean wilderness.

This lovely gazelle is just one of a million species which are at risk of extinction. The Blue Whale and the Chimpanzee are on the list too. So is the Asian Elephant and the African Wild Dog. So, nearer to home, are Swallows and Swifts, Song Thrushes and Skylarks. So are Spreading Bellflowers and Meadow Sage… One in five species is under threat.

On this World Wildlife Day, we are helped by today’s prayer to lament the looming loss of such wonders and to stand contrite before our Creator. Behind its words lies a dislocation neatly expressed elsewhere by David Attenborough: “We have moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature”. Yet thousands of years before, the wise Hebrew author of Ecclesiastes had written about the vast intertwined web of life into which we are woven: “The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other” (3.19). Today’s prayer rouses us to protect that web of life – before time runs out.

Hear my prayer, O Lord,

And let my crying come unto thee

Psalm 102.1

Who knows what lay behind the anguished plea which is today’s prayer? It’s the opening cry of Psalm 102 and leads into image after image of alienation and distress. The psalmist’s heart is ‘stricken and withered’ (v4) and his sleepless body ‘wasted with groaning’ (vs 4, 5). He is like ‘a little owl of the wilderness’ (v6). He eats ‘ashes like bread’ (v9)… No wonder this is one of the psalms set for Ash Wednesday.

Whatever specific circumstances gave rise to Psalm 102, we can all relate to its description of distressed alienation from time to time, and certainly today. For Ash Wednesday invites us to acknowledge our ‘sin’ – in other words, everything which separates us from each other, from our best selves and from God. And conscious of this separation, we share the psalmist’s longing to be heard, desperate for God in our darkness, for re-connection: ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee’.

In 1682, Henry Purcell set these words for eight voices. A solo alto sings the first hauntingly simple phrase and gradually the others join in as the texture builds and the anguish grows. We hear a sob each time the word ‘crying’ is sung and the intense dissonances ache for resolution. Purcell’s own longing to be heard by God is revealed, a 17th-century ‘little owl’ in his own wilderness - like us in ours.