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Two Mothers Day Prayers

I.

A Prayer For All Who Mother

We reflect in thanksgiving this day for all those whose lives have nurtured ours.
The life-giving ones
Who heal with their presence
Who listen in sympathy
Who give wise advice … but only when asked for it.
We are grateful for all those who have mothered us
Who have held us gently in times of sorrow
Who celebrated with us our triumphs — no matter how small
Who noticed when we changed and grew,
who praised us for taking risks
who took genuine pride in our success,
and who expressed genuine compassion when we did not succeed.
On this day that honors Mothers
let us honor all who mother
All those generous souls
who from somewhere in their being
have freely and wholeheartedly given life, and sustenance, and vision to us.


Dear God,
grant us life-giving ways
strength for birthing,
and a nurturing spirit
that we may take attentive care of our world,
our communities, and those precious beings
entrusted to us by biology, or by destiny, or by friendship, fellowship or fate.
Give us the heart of a loving mother today.

Amen.

II.

Spirit of Life,

Known to us in many ways, but so often, in so many cultures, in the image of a mother,

Hold us in your arms this day.

Let all that we value and all that we hold dear in the images of motherhood we carry be our guide.

We are grateful for all the parents that share the community of this congregation: The young ones and the old ones, those still with us and those departed. May the blessings they give us be rich and overflowing.

For some of us our experiences and images of parents have been tarnished by absence or abuse. Let us not forget that not all mothers, not all parents, have been able to rise to the many challenges that parenting brings us. May we find healing and maybe even forgiveness for all the ways that our parents fell short of fulfilling the love that gave us birth.

The community of this church gives us a great blessing: we are gifted with the chance to celebrate births, and parenting, and the glorious unfolding of human potential. Today is a day for such celebration. Let us make the most of it. Let us use it for thanksgiving and renewal and re-dedication in the good company of loved ones and friends.

May it be so! Amen.

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AI And Sermon Prep

My co-worker asked me today about using A.I. as a resource in preaching. Great question.

I did this once, and I don’t see myself doing it again, and here’s why:

When I entered a bunch of my writing into ChatGPT in April 2023 and asked it to generate a sermon about stewardship of the earth, it spewed back a nicely organized set of sentences and paragraphs that kind of sounded like me. It was certainly readable prose. But was it deliverable prose? Was it sermonic? No. Nope.

That is because Artificial Intelligence is not alive, and a sermon must come from the life force: the preacher’s living connection to their body, their life in relationship to the Holy Spirit, the ruach hakodesh, the cosmos, creation. I cannot deliver something that was not born but generated. Jesus said that thing about not feeding our children stones when they ask for bread. Stones actually have a lot more life force in them than does AI.

What do you believe about the transmission of life, hope, love and wisdom-giving energy through the generations, through the natural world, the sacred realm and through and among human beings? The way you answer that question will inform your decision to use or not use AI as a resource in your preaching. For myself, I do not want to begin with something dead and inert and have that enter my brain and creative process. It felt to me like gulping a meal of concrete. After reviewing my ChapGPT-generated sermon, it took considerable time and intention after that consumption of cement to get a sense of the blood flowing through my veins and the creative channels opening. Such a strange sensation, to feel a sense that I need to recover from ingesting inert reproduction of my own syntax and ideas.

I want to explore the fantastic potential of AI but I will not be using it as a resource for sermon preparation.

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A Friendship With Creation

Hello friends,

I preached last weekend on “a conversation with creation,” featuring the remarkable place Star Island on the coast of New Hampshire whose winter caretaker, Alexandra deStigeur, is featured in this short documentary, Winter’s Watch. 

I had preached a version of this sermon two years ago but after a year where so many people have experienced solitude, isolation and seclusion, I thought it would be worthwhile to edit and revisit. It’s one thing to consider the richness of solitude and connecting more with creation and your own inner life when you’re out and about fully in whatever social life you’ve got going, and entirely another matter when you’re living through a pandemic.

This quote from poet David Whyte rang a big bell for several parishioners who requested a copy of it, and I was happy to oblige because his framing of what constitutes a conversation is spiritually valuable. Here’s what I wrote, and what he said:

“Another of those muses of solitude is poet David Whyte. A few years ago, he was a guest on “The Lonely Hour Podcast” (host Julia Bainbridge) and he said something that resonates for me more now than when I first heard it in 2017:

      I think one of the difficulties of today is that we put all of our eggs in one basket in that we try to hold the conversation entirely through human forms, and yet throughout our evolution as human beings, we’ve always held a conversation with a multiplicity of qualities,

like with the blue of the sky, or the red in the sunset in the evening

or the movement of leaves, you know, at the very top of a silent wood when the breeze is coming through.

The sound of an owl in the evening.

The smell of grass, the feel of a summer breeze on your skin.

These are all conversations; these are actually all qualities and it’s just very strange that we’ve defined the fact that you’re just not in conversation with another human being as being ‘alone.’

You’re not alone. You’re just not paying attention to these other thousands of qualities that we’ve co-evolved with over the thousands of years.

So one of the reasons we’re lonely is we’ve forgotten that we have a friendship with the sky, we have a friendship with the ground, we have a friendship with our bodies, we have a friendship with the way our bodies respond to the natural world.

And you might be interested in the whole sermon.