Cantica Gaudia

Ordinary Time, Fall: Friday Evening Prayer

Opening:  Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter.

Canticle:  Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, for our eyes have seen your saving grace: a light to the world and the light of life, seen in our Savior's face.

Psalm: May God be merciful to us and bless us,
Show us the light of his countenance and come to us.

Let your ways be known upon earth,
Your saving health among all nations.

Let the peoples praise you, O God;
Let all the peoples praise you.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
For you judge the peoples with equity
And guide all the nations upon earth.

Let the peoples praise you, O God;
Let all the peoples praise you.

The earth has brought forth its increase;
May God, our own God, give us her blessing.

May God give us his blessing,
And may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of her.

Glory to God, who made us, who bears our pain, and who loves us;
As it once was, is, and ever shall be.  Amen.

Reading: When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up on all other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven, may Your name be sanctified; Your commandment stretches over heaven and earth, may Your compassion come upon earth as it is in heaven.  Forgive us our sin and wrongdoings, You the Lord of all good things; cause Your mercy to descend upon us, Your healing upon this sickness, and it will be healed.  Amen

Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, enter our silences. 
Come Holy Spirit, into the depths of our longing.
Come Holy Spirit, our friend and our lover. 
Come Holy Spirit, unmask our pretending. 
Come Holy Spirit, expose our lives. 
Come Holy Spirit, sustain our weakness. 
Come Holy Spirit, redeem our creation.

Enter our trusting, 
enter our fearing, 
enter our letting go, 
enter our holding back.

Flood our barren spaces, 
make fertile our deserts within. 
Break us and heal us, 
liberator of our desires.

Come Holy Spirit, embrace and free us.

Collect: Lord of heaven's reach, of earth reborn; you call us from starless graves to sing under infinite skies: we praise your name for those who have walked this way unheralded and unnumbered but known to you, their beginning, their end, their joy in life; give us the same grace to be unbound and take the step of faith, through Jesus Christ, the alpha and omega. Amen.

Going Forth: Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.