Wendy VanderWal Martin offers a beautiful contribution to our new teaching theme by exploring the possibility that those who have come before us and those who have ‘loved us in the flesh’ are still present to us beyond death and can be significant portals of Love. She turns to the great cloud of witnesses mentioned in Hebrews 12 to help us imagine this and shares her own experiences of this kind of presence in her life. Wendy invites us all to be open to the idea that we are truly never alone.
As we start to move into our new teaching theme of “The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness,” Rachael reviews what inspired it and brings forward Walter’s contributions about the vulnerability of love from before the theme even began! Then she explores the idea that our human experience of the path of love is always a way in the wilderness, and that the conditions that make love hard and vulnerable are exactly what cause its most beautiful expressions to emerge.
Our main liturgy has used a beloved version of St. Patrick’s Breastplate (from the Northumbria community) for many years now as a blessing prayer before the closing. It seemed hard to imagine that we could find something different for the Alternate Liturgy that had a similar depth and beauty. Then we were reminded of the Prayer of St. Brendan – the Celtic saint famous for setting off in a coracle for places unknown some 1500 years ago. The prayer below, attributed to him, is one of those that seems to get more relevant every time we pray it, in spite of (because of?) its ancient origins.
Now, as we are encouraged and united in your love,
Send us on our way with your peace.Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
(Prayer of St. Brendan)
It’s followed by a blessing from Northumbria’s morning prayer (from Celtic Daily Prayer), though we recently adapted the pronouns, emphasizing that the Trinity has plurality (communality) as well as unity and freeing us from distractions of gender attributions to God.
May the peace of the Trinity go with you,
wherever They may send you.
May They guide you through the wilderness,
protect you through the storm.
May They bring you home rejoicing
at the wonders They have shown you.
May They bring you home rejoicing
once again into our doors.
And that wraps up this series exploring the Alternate Liturgy – I hope it has conveyed something of that weekly journey of connection and renewal that has made the Celtic Service such a life-giving time for me and many others.
On this 2nd Breakfast (and last service before his sabbatical begins), Walter shares his inability to tell whether the fact that it’s taken him ten years since he admitted to himself that he was unhealthily over-stressed with work responsibilities is a confession (of rationalizations and justifications) or a celebration that he’s finally made it to a reduced workload. He then invites everyone to reflect on whether they are avoiding or facing reality as 2025 begins.
(Exploring the Alternate Liturgy, Pt. 5)
The centrepiece of the Celtic Service is a weekly time of Communion (or Eucharist). In both our main and alternate liturgies, we’ve avoided the standard “words of institution” just as we’ve avoided hierarchical and formulaic means that may be supposed to determine any “validity” to what we are remembering and celebrating. We trust in the Presence of the Spirit of Christ in our midst as celebrated and welcomed by the hearts and intentions of those meeting together.
And so the words, as we approach and celebrate Communion together, are primarily words of welcome and invitation. The New Testament passage (1 Cor. 11) that is often misinterpreted as a reason to guard who participates is meant to convey the opposite – “unworthy” participation does not refer to those who aren’t sure what they believe but those who participate divisively based on class differences: feasting on a full meal while the poor are elsewhere with a meager Communion.
The heart of our Communion is a time of experiencing the taste of our Welcome – a time of participating together with gratitude in the love that draws us together. The self-giving Love of Jesus forgives, enables and empowers us communally and individually as we are symbolically nourished by the bread and wine.
The words in this section of the Alternate Liturgy are perhaps a quirky blend, and specific origins have not been well-traced. Some are traditional (Book of Common Prayer – perhaps to make up for our avoidance of formulae), some are borrowed and tweaked bits from liturgies of the Iona community, and some are original to us:
(Approaching the Table)
Welcome now to the unity of God’s table,
Friend and stranger, saint and sinner.Listen, all you who gather here:
Come with hope or hesitation,
Come with joy or yearning.
All you who hunger,
All you who thirst for the fullness of life:
Come.Generous God and gracious Saviour,
Touch us through your Spirit.Knowing that God delights to liberate and forgive,
We embrace our identity as God’s Beloved.
Let us lay down the burdens of sin and shame
that we no longer need to carry.God of love and justice,
Have mercy on us.Hear now the teaching of Jesus,
That as we confess our sins and weakness,We are set free
and invited into the life of the Spirit.(Holy Communion)
Liberated and reconciled,
[Leader lifts and breaks the bread.]
We participate in God’s welcome to the world.
Together in suffering,
Together in love.May we know your Presence
[Bread and wine are shared.]
In the sharing of this bread and cup,
So that we may know your same touch
In all of our lives.We celebrate the life that Jesus has shared
Among his community through the centuries,
And shares with us now.Made one with Christ
And one with each other,
We offer ourselves
As a holy and living sacrifice.
AmenThe Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts;
We lift them up to God.
Let us give thanks to God;
It is right to give both thanks and praise.Lead us now O God
As we acknowledge your gift of grace
And live our lives as forgiven people.Heaven and earth rejoice,
And the whole earth cries Glory through Christ our Lord.
Communion has been celebrated with our Celtic liturgy in many places including here under olive trees in Assisi.
(Exploring the Alternate Liturgy, Pt. 4)
For the prayer and intercession section of our Alternate Liturgy, we had a bit of a dilemma. We weren’t sure that we wanted to lose the traditional element of including “The Lord’s Prayer,” but we wanted something fresher and more inclusive. I found something in a 1989 New Zealand Prayer Book, written to integrate Maori prayers and a beautiful and inclusive paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer by Rev. James Cotter.
The more I’ve used the Alternate Liturgy, the more that I’ve appreciated the depth and beauty of this poetic re-shaping of the prayer. Sometimes I choose the Alternate Liturgy just to be reminded of it. And, as a coincidental(?) bonus, the styling of the second half reflects back to that of our Invocation.
Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God in whom is heaven.
May the hallowing of your name echo through the universe;
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world;
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings;
Your dream of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
Now and forever, Amen.*
*Paraphrase of The Lord’s Prayer, originally J. Cotter, prepared by the English Language Liturgical Consultation (ELLC), 1988, held in the public domain, and found in A New Zealand Prayer Book, 1989
We follow that with the same intercessory prayer that we use in the main liturgy, partly because the focus here is for nothing to distract giving our compassionate attention to those who are hurting:
We join with all who suffer and ask, “How long?”
(Slowly)With compassion,
we remember those who endure the pain
of violence,
poverty,
illness,
loneliness,
loss,
and despair.God, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Linocut by Helen Soucoup – “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”
The next section of the Alternate Liturgy serves as a unique form of invocation – an invitation for us to be aware of the Presence of God, to acknowledge the connection that we often forget is at the centre of our lives.
I believe that this section is all original to our community, but I wouldn’t be shocked if a phrase or two was recalled from elsewhere. An earlier version of this began the liturgy before we added the Thanksgiving Address to the beginning, and we’ve made a few improvements along the way as well.
A key priority in this section is for us to start with a mindful and honest acknowledgement of “how we are coming” to the service, particularly with an awareness of how often the conscious experience of Presence and connection drift away from our attention as we live our lives.
About two thirds of the way through, we turn our attention from our starting place, and “call out for help.” Here is the invocation proper, when we invite God to meet us in our need and help prepare us to face life well. Here is the “Joining” section:
From where we are,
We begin the journey
We sense that we are often disconnected
From our bodies, from ourselves
From each other – those near and those far away
From the dirt beneath our feet, the sky above us
From You, our God – ever present, often hidden
Manifest and silent
Now, we are here
We are here together
Now, we take a step
we reach out, we take a breath
Together, we wait
With our doubt and our faith
We look up, raise our voices, and call out for help
When we hurt and when we grieve
Walk with us
When we are stubborn and rebellious
Soften us
When we are mired in self-pity
Free us
When we hide in shame
Find us
When we are anxious and afraid
Encourage us
When we see only ourselves
Open our eyes
This Sunday, Jess Williams introduced our new teaching theme, ‘The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness’ and invited us to enter the year holding the question, “is this the path of love?” as a guide through the times ahead. She explains how the leadership collective arrived at this theme, and shares some of the passages, poetry, and community insights that led them here.
(“Exploring the Alternate Liturgy” – Part 2)
Many of you will remember the friendship of Kanatiio, a wise Mohawk (Kanien’kehà:ka) man whom the Peskotomuhkati invited to St. Stephen for a few years to help them in their process of gaining official Canadian recognition. While he was here, Kanatiio once visited our church and led us in “The Words Before All Else,” also known as the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. He stood before us and improvised a brief (about twenty minute) sharing of thanks for “all our relations.” This acknowledgement of our “duty of gratitude” for all the facets of a good Creation sets a tone of positive humility and service.
This Thanksgiving Address has also become well known through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She writes that the Address not only “sets gratitude as the highest priority” but also serves as a “lesson in Native science.” She recalls being told frequently that the words are meant as a gift to the world and are to be shared freely.
We had wondered at times about using a land acknowledgement – a great idea, but one that can often come across as rote or incomplete when tacked onto a meeting. The idea came that integrating a version of this Thanksgiving Address would both acknowledge relationship and engage us in integrating a key foundation of an Indigenous worldview that is a good beginning for living well on this land that for many millennia has been, and still is, the homeland of the Peskotomuhkati people.
I adapted a very brief taste of this Address as an opening for our Alternate Liturgy and received Kanatiio’s blessing for using it in this way in our services:
Today we have gathered, and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty and responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give our greetings and our thanks to one another as people.
Now our minds are one
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. And we give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We acknowledge the fish and all the creatures in the waters, and we give our thanks.
Now our minds are one
Now we turn toward the plants. As far as the eye can see, the plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. We are grateful to the animals on the land and all the birds in the sky. We are thankful for the four winds and the four seasons, for the rain and the sun, the moon and the stars. With one mind, we give our greetings and our thanks.
Now our minds are one
We consider those who have gone before us, our elders and our teachers, who have gathered and shared wisdom. When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live. We give our listening ears and thanks. And we turn our thoughts to the Creator, and we send our greetings and our thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here.
For all the love that is around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to you, Creator.
Now our minds are one
Our hope is that beginning our Alternate Liturgy with these words will help us acknowledge our fundamental unity as part of a living, connected Creation – grateful to Creator and to all our relations. And we hope also that they remind us that the friendship and welcome of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island is crucial to our living here well, and for us, particularly, the welcome of the Peskotomuhkati here along the St. Croix (Skutik) watershed.
(Click here or on the “Articles” tab at the top of the page to see the intro to this series and follow along this week as I introduce the other sections that make up our “Alternate Liturgy.”)
AN INTRODUCTION
In 2007, SCC started an experiment: a second service upstairs in the café with an informal liturgy inspired by Celtic communities like Iona and Northumbria. It has proven to be an enduring experiment! From the beginning, we (especially Katie Gorrie and Joel Mason) borrowed bits from those communities and elsewhere, added our own original touches, and shaped a short service that would meet a more contemplative need than our usual services.
In the following years, we updated our liturgy regularly, removing bits that didn’t feel right and trying out new additions. We moved toward more inclusive language while holding onto some traditional phrasing. About ten years ago, we realised that we had so fallen in love with the liturgy that we didn’t really want to part with any “bits” anymore. More and more, visitors had been touched by services and carried booklets home with them across the world. It felt like something special to think that similar words might be used in scattered communities in faraway places. Since then, the only changes we’ve made to our regular liturgy were minor tweaks to improve the flow or experience.
But we still wanted to have the room to experiment with new liturgical expressions to see what they could add to our life together. We decided to create an “Alternate Liturgy” that leaders could choose to use occasionally for something different. We now use it around once a month. It may be “alternate,” but it is also starting to “feel like us”! As this new year begins, I wanted to introduce more folks to the sections that make up this “alternate liturgical journey” that we’ve been travelling, now and then, for ten years. So for the next couple of weeks stayed tune here to explore the different sections that make up the “Alternate Liturgy.”
