A blessing for a gentle summer

Scrolling through FaceBook this week, I found this posted on a sweet friend's wall and it seemed a perfectly good complement to the liturgies we are saying and living into this summer as a community. There are several writers that I enjoy who write blessings and prayers for situations and circumstances that speak deeply to my heart. W. David O. Taylor, director of Brehm Texas for Fuller Seminary, writes prayers for adults and children that capture holy moments or those ordinary experiences for which a prayer becomes handy and helpful. And Kate Bowler, Duke history professor and young mother with cancer, wrote blessings through Lent this year in a similar style.

Read and pray this one as we re-gather, recite new words together and look to find God in every moment holy:

A blessing for a gentle summer

Blessed are we, coming into a summer of in-between.
We are glad to shelter here awhile, where there can be some recovery from all that our eyes have seen and our hearts have borne.
We are wondering...what just happened?
Tragedy on slow-release, the shock of sudden outrage, the variants of unusual size, the sweet sense that normal maybe isn't obsolete.
We are wondering...what could happen?
We are at a threshold, a season that holds liminal space for what was, and what might be.
God, gather us close, and in this small and cradled space may we let the whole weight of our very selves rest secure.
Be the peace that settles our bodies, that we might awaken each day curious as to what new thing You are doing, what beauty might yet be.
                                               Kate Bowler

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation