Harborview Spiritual Care Sundays

This is a poem that I read on Wednesday during our centering time, and I keep coming back to it... I hope it brings you some words that you might need for your next week at HMC.  Blessing for the Brokenhearted – Jan Richardson There is no remedy for love but to love more. —Henry David Thoreau Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love. Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound, when every day our waking opens it anew. Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this— as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it, as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still, as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless. http://paintedprayerbook.com/2014/02/10...

  a blessing for Easter Sunday “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week… Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”—John 20:19, ESV Oh God, we stretch out our hands to you in this early Easter darkness. We need you to pull us up and set us on our feet again,  for we are weak and tired. God, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Spirit, have mercy. God, on that first Easter morning while it was still dark, one woman went alone to the tomb to do what could be done to honor you, though hope had drained away. Two bright angels met her there, and then – how is it possible? – you were there. fully alive, beyond belief. in doubt and grief, in sickness of body and mind and spirit, our prayers not fully realized, rejoicing… anyway. carrying forth the realized hope of the Resurrected One, singing our alleluias great and small, while it is still dark. Blessed are we who stretch out our hands to you For that is what makes us Easter people: Christ is ris...

  a prayer for love, love, love by Kate Bowler  Lord, the shadowed world  is full of troubles. So give me the good,  inconvenient work of love. Link my life to others  so that their worries  become my own. Give me errands I don’t want  which ease the burdens of others. Divert me from the plans I’ve made  to zip from A to B when you have better ideas.  Put my hands to work  with a less-grumbling heart  and let their dreams drift into my own.   You’ve given me tools to use  and ideas to fashion  that will bring me neither recognition,  nor money, nor praise. You’ve made love such a sneaky thing.  The more we love as you do,  the less we are keeping track of it at all.

(This benediction below was inspired by Saint Julian of Norwich and is the sending blessing that Rev.  Lizzie McManus-Dail  gives every week at her church in Austin, TX)  God did not promise that our lives would be easy,  or pain-free, or without enemies, or unshaken by tempests.  But God did promise:  in the belly of the beast? God will be there. Because God was already there, with us,  for us,  each of us,  all of us,  always.  And so the blessing of God,  Who is both the storm, and the shelter, ready you, bless you, and keep you....   This is from a wonderful article to check out about 12 Christian women shaping the world in 2025.  https://sojo.net/articles/12-christian-women-shaping-church-2025 You will love reading about each and every woman here.