O Depth of love, You who dwell in both the light and the
shadows,
Enter with us into the Holy Week festival of our own
inconsistency.
For we are part-time disciples who are, ourselves, part
light and part darkness,
Part Peter and part Pilate;
Part praise and part lament,
Part sacred and part secular,
Part resurrection and part Easter Bunny,
Part here, part there, part everywhere, part nowhere;
And here at the gates of Jerusalem we cry out to you to take
our many parts
And make us whole again.
We gather with the throngs in praise today:
For planetary
orbits and gravitation and Higgs Boson particles,
For children and stories and bedtime;
For parents whose courageous living and tender hearts will
always be with us;
For lovers found and loves that once were;
For the miracle of life in us and around us,
And for the infinitely impossible probability that all the
conditions needed for life exist in just the right proportions here on earth.
But we gather too, at the wailing wall, conscious of our
pain as well:
Mend, we pray, those hearts here today that are torn by loss
or betrayal;
Soften again those hearts here today that have hardened by
the heat of too much cynicism, that they may be molded again for beating hope;
Sew together what is torn in us, and frayed;
Integrate that in our spirits and in our lives that is
fragmented;
Sing to us in our places of darkness,
And whistle us toward the light –
Even if it means trusting what is near impossible for us to
trust:
That Good news lies on
the other side of the midnight
garden,
the far side of abandonment
the dark side of the cross
the shadow side of our selves
The other side of all we know
Take our Palm Sunday selves, O God, this week, and hurl us
across the shadows of Holy Week, that we might be singed by the fires of our
own faithlessness, just enough to open our mouths in a gasp…that we might
breathe in the breath of Resurrection life.
For you are a God who would wash and kiss the feet of the
prisoner;
Would feed us a meal of celebration in the presence of death
itself;
Would sit with us in a midnight garden and keep vigil while
all others had fallen asleep,
And would roll away the stones that hold in the stench of
our own deaths…
O God of shadow and of light…..we believe! Help our unbelief. Amen.
