Kathy Coffey

Sometimes an occasion demands a prayer. Rather than stuff that vague feeling of “I want to honor this time/season/mood, but don’t have time to concoct a formal observance,” turn to IN DUE SEASON, by Ken Phillips (Twenty-third Publications, 2014.)

Full disclosure: Ken has been liturgical director and exuberant musician at Regis University, Denver for many years. When I first heard his stunning Advent celebrations, or prose poems created for other events, I bugged him to seek a wider audience. Now that he has finally published his accumulated work, I’m delighted for him—and mightily impressed.

Volume 1 covers autumn, Advent, Christmas and feasts up to Mardi Gras. Volume 2 will offer prayers for spring, Lent, Easter and summer. While some of us may have grown overly familiar or numbly habituated to the prayers we hear in church, Ken nudges us out of anesthesia with lyrical cadences, subtle wit, and bold re-imaginings. For instance, on the Feast of the Holy Family, he names that sense of inferiority we all feel in the face of such impossible goodness:

Their famous meekness

and piety and love

of one another

make my situation look really

lame and a lot less than Holy.

Decorating the Christmas tree, which he finds a symbol for transformation, he compares the task to God’s creativity:

as we,

with fragile glass

and shining tinsel

do what You can do

with finer stuff

in the human heart.

Enough of excerpts, designed to enchant and intrigue. The book can be used for groups or individuals and is especially suited for ecumenical services. It includes music suggestions, set up directions and reflection questions. Designed for lay leadership, it makes ritual graceful and easy—no more stilted, awkward attempts. Relax into the guidance of a seasoned pro.

In our time and place, miracles still abound. The sun rises and sets, often in spectacular beauty. Spring gradually colors an earth that appeared barren. Penicillin, heart transplants and other medical advances save people who fifty years ago, would have died young. People reach beyond their selfish needs to help others, even when it’s costly.

When power and back-up generators failed during hurricane Sandy in Oct., 2012, nurses at New York University hospital carefully carried patients, including a 27-week old premature baby, down nine flights of steps, evacuating them to other hospitals in the middle of the night. Less dramatic but just as kindly, those who had power after the storm ran long extension cords to their porches so those without could charge their cell phones and computers.

Sometimes we pray long and hard for a miracle, then when it finally arrives, we get used to it. Aching to be healthy again—then taking it for granted after the cure. Hoping to get pregnant, praying for a healthy baby, then wanting to strangle that surly teenager fourteen years later. Or wanting so badly to get the house… the job… the promotion… whatever it was, and now just wanting to get away from it? We spend so much time thinking about what we don’t have, we forget to be grateful for all we have.

And these blessings are mostly on a natural plane. Could we ever fully appreciate God’s gifts of life, forgiveness, salvation, family, education, friendship, and more? Perhaps the real challenge is to live out of gratitude for the abundant miracles that surround us.

It’s exciting to be there when an attractive, bright, young leader launches a career—in politics, the church, education, whatever the arena. The audience sits up straight and says, “That is one to watch!”

So it must have been for those lucky enough to be around for the “calling” stories we hear in the gospels of this season, when Jesus begins his public ministry. In them, Jesus announces not the wrath of God, nor the triumph of God, nor the punishment of God, but the healing, freeing, feeding, tender touch of God.

And what of those who may not have heard Jesus initially, but would soon be dramatically affected by his healing power? The first was Peter’s mother-in-law. Rumors of that synagogue announcement might have penetrated her fever with a gleam of hope. Blind Bartimaeus, the woman bent double for eighteen years, the paralytic, the leper, the widow of Nain, those who would hear the Beatitudes and perhaps for the first time know blessing in what had seemed like unrelieved misery: all probably carried on their usual routines that day oblivious to huge change on the horizon.

What of us, today, who also seem distanced by time and space from the direct proclamation of gracious words? We may be just as unaware of what hovers seemingly out of reach.

To be continued…

The trouble with some Bible passages is overfamiliarity. We’ve heard them so often, they sound worn. We tune out, think about what’s for dinner, or yawn: “heard this before!”

So let’s reimagine Jesus’ words to the disciples today. Instead of “come and see,” he says, “Come fill out an application form with 734 questions in triplicate. Then sign the contracts. Ask your attorney to look over the paperwork. And get it all notarized.”

That whoosh you would’ve heard was the disciples running in the other direction. Bear in mind, these were uneducated fisherfolk. They wouldn’t have been impressed by military power or university degrees. They’d reject compulsion but respond to invitation. They were deeply compelled by the person of Jesus.

Try to remember the last time you were so excited about someone you ran to tell your friends, then praised this person so extravagantly, your friends couldn’t resist. They dropped what they were doing, abandoned their busy schedules, and checked out the reality. Did that happen  to the disciples?