All Saints Day Prayer Stations
All Saints
What is All Saints Day?
We are in a season honored for generations in the Christian calendar. It is the braiding of northern European traditions and Christian spirituality and no matter how you approach it, it can bring meaning to the holiday season ahead. As hours of daylight dwindled, folks named their fears (and literally dressed up in costume as what scared them most).
This is a space for naming grief, loss and sadness. It is a space for naming our fears of death; our own and our loss of others. In a modern world where we are expected to be fine, it is honest space. As challenging as this may be the gift is we do not do it alone. We name our grief, our loss and our fear. We do this with out it seeking up on us, we do it with intention and the gift is we do not do this alone.
This sacred day is woven into who we are as people of faith so that we can name our grief before the trees are trimmed and the holiday sparkle expected. This sacred pause calls us to remember our mortality so that we may live life well, that we may take each breath with courage and honor the pulse of our heart.
We are glad you are with us.
Station One: Remember Your Baptism
Baptism is an outward sign of God’s inward presence,
a ritual of connection, nurture and love and a reminder that we are all family…one big wild family.
Pause at the water, remember your baptism, touch the water and pause in silent prayer or linger over this meditation from Cries of the Spirit by Denise Levertov.
"The Fountain” by Denise Levertov
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don't say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strong power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
Station Two: Name Your Saints and Honor The People You Miss
Place your photo or image or quote on the alter among the others whom are felt in spirit. The ones we look toward but cannot see, the ones for whom we reach but can not touch. The ones who gifted us in their journey and inspire us in each breath.
If you would like to write their names or draw an image to leave on the alter, please do.
Meditate on the words and images left by others and on the words of Paul to the people in Corinth, love never ends, nothing can separate us from God’s love and the love that flows in and through us to one another.
1 Corinthians 13: 4-8
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
Station Three: Name Your Loss
We gather to name the people we grieve,
we gather to name the dreams deferred and the wounds of waiting, longing and need,
we gather to name the broken spaces of our hearts
we gather to name our fear of mortality and death and
the gift is we don’t have to do that alone.
Light your candle, name your heartbreak and heaviness, pause and pray.
Watch your flame dapped with light and dark and remember you are not alone.
Meditate in silence or join Valarie Kaur’s reflection from See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto Of Revolutionary Love.
“Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the boarders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.”
Station Four: Claim Your Hope
Having named our grief we can journey in hope, having named our mortality we can journey as people committed to live life in each moment.
Pause to reflect on Mary Oliver’s poetic question:
What is you you plan to do with your one, precious wild Life?
Write a word of commitment for your journey and weave in to the prayer loom.
Station Five: Journey into the World
Take a ribbon with you tie to a tree that all may see a glimpse of the love you hold and the ways we remember one another, honor one another and seek to live this life with care for each breath.
Tie the ribbon. Bless it. Remember the bonds of love we can not see but feel.
Remember every time you pass this ribbon, every day it weathers the seasons and cycles. Everyday it becomes a part of life. Imagine this ribbon the stuff of a Robyn’s spring nest. Imagine this ribbon brightening a day as it brings color to a gray, rainy sky. Imagine.
Final Station: Benediction
Parting meditation by poet Pat Maynes Ellis quotes the newspaper in her work, “Scientists find universe awash in tiny diamonds”
But haven’t we always known?
The shimmer of trees, the shaking of flames
every cloud lined with something
clean water sings
right to the belly
scouring us with its purity
it too is awash in diamonds
“so small that trillions could rest
on the head of a pin”
It is not unwise then to say
that the air is hung close with diamonds
that we breathe diamond
our lungs holding, exchanging
our blood sowing them rich and thick
along every course it takes
Does this explain
why some of us are so hard
why some of us shine
why we are all precious
that we are awash in creation
spammed with diamonds
shot through with beauty
that survived the death of stars