Seeking Wisdom

Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Public Occasions

Jann Aldredge-Clanton

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608996018
  9781498256872
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890980
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Seeking Wisdom: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Public Occasions provides clergy and laypersons with a unique resource to use in community settings, healthcare institutions, and faith communities. These blessings and prayers respect people from diverse religious traditions and use gender-inclusive language for humanity and divinity. Predominant themes are peace, justice, healing, hope, liberation, partnership in relationships, and caring for the earth. This collection includes blessings for such events as community Thanksgiving services, Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations, Women's History Month celebrations, Holocaust Remembrance Day services, breast cancer survivors celebrations, transplant survivors celebrations, chapel dedications, memorial services, lay ministers dedications, baby dedications, pastoral prayers, invocations, calls to worship, offertory prayers, benedictions, a lament for violence against women and girls, and a lament for other forms of injustice. This book also includes pastoral prayers, invocations, calls to worship, offertory prayers, benedictions, a lament for violence against women and girls, and a lament for other forms of injustice. Seeking Wisdom includes more than two hundred inclusive, interfaith blessings and prayers for public occasions. These blessings and prayers can be adapted or combined to fit specific occasions, providing a valuable resource for clergy and laypersons.

Section 1

Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Community Settings

Interfaith Day of Prayer

(held in an interfaith chapel or an interfaith prayer garden)

Opening Prayer for Peace

Leader: Divine Wisdom, we come seeking your guidance in our efforts to work together for peace. We come from diverse ethnic groups, cultures, and religions. We believe these differences enrich us all. Lead us on your paths to lasting and true peace. Holy Wisdom, show us your pathways to peace in our own hearts, in our communities, and in our world. Grant us your peace to resolve our personal internal and external conflicts. And may your divine peace that surpasses all human understanding flow from us to our community and to our country and on to our world. May we be good stewards of the resources you have given us as individuals and as a nation. Guide us to use these resources well in relationship with our world. Help us to give equal respect to all people—women, men, and children of all races, cultures, and religions in all nations. For we are all created by you in your own image, and we are all precious to you. May we join hands as sisters and brothers in this community and around the world to work for peace, to heal divisions, to break down walls, to end oppressive systems. Give us grace to join your holy work of making peace on earth as we continue to become all you created us to be.

Responsive Prayer of Commitment

Leader: Gracious Maker of us all, we commit ourselves to giving mutual respect to everyone in order to help bring peace and understanding among people of different religions, ethnic groups, and cultures.

All: We commit ourselves to celebrating our religious, cultural, and racial diversity and to making more opportunities for greater understanding.

Leader: We commit ourselves to creating dialogue, so that there will be an increase of mutual trust and cooperation among individuals, among communities, and among nations.

All: We commit ourselves to working for justice and freedom for all people, so that there can be true peace in our world.

Leader: We commit ourselves to forgiving one another for past and present prejudices and injustices.

All: We commit ourselves to supporting one another in our common efforts to overcome all forms of discrimination, hatred, greed, and violence.

Leader: We commit ourselves to taking the side of the poor and the oppressed, to speaking out for those who have no voice, and to working effectively to change these conditions.

All: We commit ourselves to promoting friendship and solidarity among people, for we are convinced that increased understanding of one another will bring peace and justice.

Leader: We commit ourselves to urging leaders of nations to work together for peace based on justice. For “how very good and pleasant it is” when we recognize that all people of the world are sisters and brothers, and we “live together in unity” (Psalm 133:1).

All: This prayer of commitment we bring to you, Loving Maker.

Responsive Closing Blessing

Leader: May Divine Wisdom give guidance to all people.

All: May Divine Wisdom bless all people with peace.

Leader: May we go forth from this place remembering that all people—women, men, and children of all races, religions, and cultures in all nations—are created equally in the divine image.

All: May we join hands as sisters and brothers in this community and around the world to heal divisions and to build bridges of respect and understanding.

Leader: Go forth with wisdom and grace to join our Creator’s work of making peace on earth as we continue to become all we are created to be.

All: So let it be, now and always.

Interfaith Community
Thanksgiving Service

It is good to give thanks to you, Holy One, to sing praises to your name, to declare your steadfast love and faithfulness. May we experience your presence in fresh ways as we come together to build bridges of understanding and cooperation. In this worship service may we find new connections with you and with one another that we translate into deeds of justice and compassion.

Giver of Bountiful Blessings, we come with deep gratitude for health and strength, for opportunities to give and to receive, for eyes to see the beauty of a sunset and the sparkle in the eyes of children, for ears to hear music and laughter, for tongues to speak and to taste Thanksgiving feasts. But we also come to remember those children whose eyes cry out their need and whose ears too often hear the growling in their own stomachs and the fighting of those around them who are struggling in their poverty. Help us to feel the suffering of our sisters and brothers in need and to respond. Challenge us to join with you and with one another in breaking down barriers of prejudice, injustice, ignorance, and poverty so that all your people—female and male of all races and religions and nationalities—may have the freedom to become all you created us to be. Empower us with your love so that we can be your agents of change in our community and in our world, through your gracious Spirit. So let it be!

Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Celebration

Leader: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,”1 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote and preached. Dr. King used love and nonviolent resistance to work against racism, classism, and militarism.

All: Dr. King’s words and actions inspire us today to work against all forms of injustice, including sexism, heterosexism, and ableism along with racism, classism, and militarism.

Leader: Yes! Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that all of us “are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”2

All: Let us honor Martin Luther King Jr. today through nonviolent actions against injustice anywhere. Let us work toward Dr. King’s vision of a world free of discrimination and injustice in any form. May our words and actions help to create a world where all can be free to become what we are created to be.

Leader: Holy Wisdom, guide our celebration today. May the life of your prophet Martin Luther King Jr. inspire us to join hands as brothers and sisters of many races and religions to work toward the vision of justice and peace everywhere in our world. Let it be so!

Habitat for Humanity Workers

Spirit of Love, thank you for bringing brothers and sisters of many races and religions together to build homes for families who need them. May the Habitat for Humanity workers here today feel the deep-down reward of knowing they are not only building a house, but they are building human dignity. They are helping to eliminate the depressing and debilitating cycle of poverty, and affirming the worth of all your creation. May these workers feel the reward of joining with committed people of faith throughout the country to build a more just and peaceful society by spreading this world’s resources more equitably. May they feel the reward of joining you to build a more loving world. Help all the workers here today to feel your smile upon them. Bless and strengthen them as they build love, justice, human dignity, and unity. Amen.

Women’s History Month
Celebration

Leader: In the beginning female and male were created in the Divine image.

All: We affirm our faith in the divine image in all of our sisters and brothers.

Leader: Then women began to be looked down on as inferior, and they were dominated and enslaved.

All: We name this pattern of domination and slavery as sin.

Leader: Remarkable achievements are absent from our history books because they were done by women.

All: We name this exclusion as sin. We affirm our responsibility to write women back into history. We celebrate all our sisters who have gone before us to light the path of liberation and justice. We celebrate all our brothers who have stood by and for women.

Leader: We celebrate our sisters, like Sojourner Truth, and our brothers, like Frederick Douglas, who worked hard and long to free both women and people of color. They lived out their strong belief that all races of women and men are created equal.

All: We affirm our commitment to join hands with one another to reclaim our past, transform our present, and create a new tomorrow.

Leader: Let us ask the blessings of the Spirit of Life and Freedom on this commitment.

All: Sister-Brother Spirit, who inspires us all, come to our gathering here this day, as we celebrate women, past and present, too often ignored, maligned, cursed, abused, but who have overcome and remained faithful to the vision you have blazed within them. Light the fire of your vision within us, so that we too will be faithful to our calling, now and always.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Gracious Mother-Father Creator, we have come together to remember your people who have suffered and died because of prejudice and hatred. As we remember the horrors of the Holocaust, renew within us the passionate determination to struggle with all our strength to ensure that never again will such suffering be inflicted on any people. But as we remember the sins of the past, we also confess our sins in the present—attitudes of distrust and scapegoating of those who are different from us, institutional racism and sexism, blaming the victims of injustice for the evils in our society, all attitudes and actions that diminish the worth and dignity of ...

Table of contents

• Seeking Wisdom
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Community Settings
• Section 2: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Healthcare Settings
• Section 3: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Faith Community Settings
• Section 4: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Varied Settings