Dear All
Below these musings there are a few possibly useful prayers!
Roy Cooper, a Reader in Training due to be licensed in October is doing some weekly Sunday Scribblings and I have made a page for his collected thoughts – https://www.readers-chaplain.org.uk/roys-sunday-scribblings/
Lez and I have been socially distancing for almost a fortnight though I have braved the Co-op first thing in the morning for some essentials! Luckily our children are shopping for us in the main! I am sure many of you are in the same situation with much more serious health issues than ours but we dont want to be part of the problem for our wonderful front line key-worker staff.
With my school work gone and grandchild contact only virtual amongst other things , I have been in a state of what I can only describe as bereavement. So many of my ex pupils and their parents are in the thick of it at the moment that my prayer is pretty much constant as is the need to do something positive.
The positive thing was to help those parents stuck at home and the volunteers at schools looking after key worker children doing their favourite school songs and stories. These I have published on this site… see the link in the menu to Jim’s Stories! Some things might be useful or at least give you a laugh.
The rainbows in the picture are appearing as a symbol of hope drawn by children so that those passing can see them.
We have hope – thank God.
Keep safe – Jim
The Prayers we sent to our Church family – you might find them useful (based on some in John Pritchard Intercessions Handbook )
Here are some prayers for use tomorrow and in the coming week. You might like to have a candle ready to light – there is one mentioned in the prayers.
Attached is the Celtic Blessing sung by Dhiworth an Gollon – our dwarves!
We’re most stretched in our intercessions when some terrible tragedy has occurred and it’s hard to know how to pray without sounding banal. Perhaps the most important need is to be honest; hence the response in this intercession, ‘O God, why?’
Our prayers today are making a time for honest emotion before God. We can’t tidy up tragedy in neat prayers. Perhaps questioning our impotence is the most effective way of identifying with the depth of sorrow felt by so many.
Lord, we’ve seen the pictures, and felt the shock. It seems so tragic, so pointless and so desperate. We’ve heard the stories, the little cameos of grief, and we feel so helpless. Sometimes we rage against this kind of event, and sometimes we feel a sense of dull fatalism that ‘this is the way the world is’.
And so we say, O God, why?
In the meantime our prayers seem futile, like stones in our mouths. Words of any kind seem trivial and clumsy. How can we pray in these situations? How can we frame anything worth saying? How did Mary pray at the crucifixion?
And so we say, O God, why?
We believe you’re somehow there in the mess of it all. At least that’s what our faith tells us. But just at the moment that doesn’t feel to be enough. We know you’re helping the helpless, as well as
helping the helpers, but the point is — it all seems too late.
And so we say, O God, why?
We’ll do our best to clear up the mess, and we’ll move on. But there are many who won’t be able to move on because they’ll have been too much changed by this event, and too traumatized.
We know you’ll stay with them every step of the way, and you’ll be at full stretch to bring them healing but still we say, O God, why?
All we can do is light a candle in the darkness to represent our fragile prayer and our battered faith. And as it burns, let it be for us a sign of your love and grace, shining in our present darkness.
Make us impatient for that day when the whole creation shall be renewed and we have a new heaven and a new earth, and we shall no longer say, ‘O God, why?’
Amen, Lord, so be it.