LET THE HEALING BEGIN…. AGAIN

Every Wednesday at 12:10 p.m. in Cummings Chapel, the Cathedral offers a unique service.

We, an ever-growing number of parishioners and others, gather around the Lord’s table to receive God’s healing for ourselves and those for whom we pray. This Holy Eucharist Healing Service is a time in the middle of the week where we can get away from the rush of our week and, if we choose, calmly lean into a venture of tough, much-needed honesty with ourselves and the Lord of Life. We worship as we can, then and there, with all that swirls in us and the world. Through scripture readings, a short homily, prayers, confession, and a contemporary Holy Communion, we allow ourselves to hold before God all that we are–the good and the bad, the faithful and the fearful, the healthy and the ill–knowing that the Spirit will engift us in ways beyond our understanding.

Please join us. You’ll see friends and meet some new folks. You’ll probably laugh and might cry. But most importantly, by God’s grace, together we will experience little by little, healing in our body, mind and spirit.

Pastor and author Ted Loder has never been to our Wednesday service, but this prayer of his wonderfully captures the spirit of our Holy Eucharist Service:

O Lord of us all, gather us now to be with you as you are with us.Soothe our tiredness; quiet our fretfulness, curb our aimlessness; relieve our compulsiveness.
Let us be easy for a moment.

O Lord, release us from the fears and guilts which grip us so tightly; from the expectations and opinions which we so tightly grip, that we may be open to receiving what you give, to risking something genuinely new that heals us deep inside.

O Lord of us all, we bring before you those we love but less fully than we would were we not so defensive or so easily frightened by true honesty.We bring to you those we live with in this society but less closely than we would were we not so fearfully suspicious or so insistent on measuring them by our comfortable biases and certainties.

O Lord of us all, by your mercy, heal the wounds we enflesh and those we have inflicted on others and ourselves.Let that healing begin with us in the knowledge that with mercy comes the power and pressure to risk the honesty and humility that will move us toward your wholeness within each and among all.

Through our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

~The Rev. Gee Alexander, Priest Associate