Ordain me to covenant,

To discern in community,

to ask daily,

Where does my most urgent calling connect with the world’s greatest need?

To listen for the answer we all make.

Ordain me to serve at Love’s Holy feast

To share the grain of paradise,

And taste the wine of peace.

To put the leaf in the table and fling the doors open wide,

To call out,

Holy Spirit, transform the elements,

Change us body, mind and soul.

Ordain me to preach

Awake to the questions, which burn like a fire in my bones

To care and discern what the impact will be

Grounded and yet learning to reach (grounded and yet stretching my fingers like a child to the shelf just out of reach)

Call me to connect with Love’s Holy Name.

Ordain me to serve

Calm near the bedside

Present to lift and unbind, to draw living water

To celebrate and baptize

To mourn and to cry,

To write and to organize

To sweep and clean when the time is right.

Ordain me to weave

To listen and learn, to celebrate the truths born in other faiths

To draw fine threads of stories from half a world away though my tapestry,

Theirs and ours vibrant but not possessed

All connected, woven and rewoven honoring the strength and integrity of each thread.

Ordain me to learn

To stretch and study, to get uncomfortable, to grow

To connect, to walk in new places around the city, across the globe

To love new faces, especially those who don’t agree with me

to look for the sacred seeded deep within.

Ordain me to be brave, resilient and strong

To have courage in the trying times;

To thoughtfully challenge and lovingly change.

To hear helpful critique and let go of pain;

Differentiated and present

Ordain me to rest

To curl up tight, overcoming sleepless nights,

Greeting the cheerful birds of dawn.

To watch the snow gently fall,

Refreshed by an afternoon at home on my couch.

Ordain me to say no

To say no, that I might really say yes.

To discern, to ask is this right for me;

Is this what I am called to do and to be,

Is this my bearing or am I floating with the current of the stream?

Ordain me to a life of discipline,

To know the dancers freedom

Emerges out of with each studied step

And numbered position.

To read, to study, to pray

To listen, to love, to learn in that same way.

Ordain me to eat food that’s not always fast

To savor dinners that nourish the soul,

Where stories are told once, than again,

And new ideas hatched.

Ordain me to love the body I am in,

Not for what it could be but for all that it is;

For the dynamics of strength and flexibility which call us to rise and to be

Durable and vulnerable, a mystery of grace

Commission me to feed it what it needs, to honor its complexity

To rest and to move as each have a season.

Ordain me to love my body

When it’s love, commission me to love madly

To dive in deep, joyfully melting in communion

Without regret and relish the tarnish some would label sin.

Ordain me to live in community

To connect, to transform this sense of isolation,

That makes the world feel cold and the city

Desolate.

Open my eyes;

enliven me,

that I might

Be.