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A PRAYER OF CONSECRATION: Adapted from: “A Liturgy Begging Grace to Accomplish What Is Beyond Me” by Douglas McKelvey from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2 O Spirit of the Living God, who raises your people from death to life, the comforting of your children in their hard journeys through the valley of the shadow is, from beginning to end, your work, not ours. We are neither wise enough nor compassionate enough, nor tempered enough by present grief to form [songs] adequate to serve these your people in the face of an enemy so formidable as death. We are wholly unfit to enter the holy sufferings of others, to give guidance or true comfort, to [write] words of consolation that would name the wounds of dying and grieving hearts, or wrap them in compassionate embrace, or remind them that there remains a firm, eternal hope which will outgrow and outlast death itself. If this work [we seek to accomplish] is not your work, then we would not have it be ours. For we would not bid the grieving hang their sorrows or their hopes on any words that cannot bear their weight. So then take this meager measure of anything we might give, O God, and bless it for the benefit of your people. Breathe spirit and life into these flawed forms. Let our insufficiencies be met by the multiplying power of your grace. We know we will encounter discouragement in this labor. We know we will often experience the creative process as an impossible struggle against self and darkness. Even so, be at work in and through us, O Lord. We will sometimes falter, lose heart, abandon course, and be tempted to turn to diversions and old comforts that cannot sustain. Even so, be at work in and through us, O Lord. On our best days we might be too confident in our own abilities to recognize the depth of our need, but more often we will be too empty, too spent, too crippled by our brokenness to believe that we have anything to give. Even so, O Lord, be at work in and through us. In the end, this is our sole means of stewardship: to repeatedly ply the imperfect talents with which you have entrusted us, daily offering to you our poverty, begging you to fill the hollow forms of our offerings. O Holy Spirit, meet, fill, and quicken now, these insufficient gifts. Inspire words and music that would shepherd and comfort your people - even in their dying, even in their griefs - voicing their mortal laments and their eternal hopes, gently turning their gaze to the promise of coming resurrection, to the hope of a world remade, and to the splendor of the King who soon returns to redeem all sorrows. Amen.
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