LITURGY BEFORE BEGINNING A BOOK
Author of Life and Author of My Life,
As I begin the reading of this book,
give me a sensitivity to listen,
not just to the story told,
but to the responses of my own heart
to what I encounter in these pages.
What does it draw out of me?
What joy?
What longing?
What fears?
What temptation?
What hope?
What mirth?
What love of beauty?
What awe?
What wonder?
What doubt?
What faith?
What resolve?
What unfinished grief?
What untended wound?
Give me ears to hear, O Spirit of God,
what notes the reading of this story would strike
and what melody it would draw forth
from the tuned strings of my own soul.
Waste no moment in my brief years, O Lord.
Let all things, and this book as well,
be as tools in your hands,
to shape me and make me more truly your own,
more fitly a child of the hope
of the restoration of all things in Christ
whose fullness dwells within them.
So let the honest responses
of my heart to this reading
grant new insight into the story
your grace is already telling in my own life
that I might be a more willing co-laborer
in that process.
Amen.
LAMENT UPON THE FINISHING OF A BELOVED BOOK
I am stirred and saddened, O Lord,
in coming to this tale's end,
to bid farewell and return now
from my sojourn in that storied place
where longings for something
more than the life I lead
were wakened.
It is in the receding glow of that small,
bright sorrow that I now linger.
Let it do its work in me,
inviting me to dig beneath these
fresh-stirred longings, to see
that their roots are not at last a longing
for the places depicted in these pages,
but are, in truth,
profound and holy wounds,
yearnings for a lost garden and a more
perfect city, where justice and righteousness
are restored, and harms are healed, and losses
redeemed, and love proved true,
and earth and heaven reconciled.
What I feel is, at its heart, a homesick hope
for a place of unbroken communion
with my Creator, and with his people,
and with all of his creation.
What I most desire
is to open my eyes and find that,
for the first time in my life,
I am home and breathing
the wild winds of my native land.
So of course my heart aches
each time I receive these beautiful,
distant rumors of that far country!
Of course I do not want such a story to end,
for it has wedged open for me
a way like a window,
through which I have glimpsed
a vision of things more as they will one day be
than as they now are in these hard
and sorrowing lands of our exile.
Thank you, O my God,
for loving me enough
that you would rouse
my deepest desires again through story,
appointing these longings as true signposts
planted in a war-torn and cratered landscape,
reminding me that all of history
is leading at last
to a king and a kingdom,
and pointing me ever onward toward
his righteous and eternal city.
May I return now
from the world of this book
to the daily details of my own life
with truer vision and fiercer hope,
trailing with me
remnants of that coming glory
I have glimpsed again
in story.
Amen.