The Songs of Our Longings - Devotional Guide

The last few years have felt to many of us like an endless procession
of struggle, loss, and grief.

We never seem to find relief from the constant pressure of multiple global and personal crises and grief has become a far-too-familiar
companion.
In the face of our loss and exhaustion, Easter can feel like an irrelevant or cruel season. How do we celebrate when our grief is overwhelming? How do we speak of resurrection when there is so much destruction around us? What difference does an ancient miracle make to our lives now and what good is a future promise of bliss when each day feels like hell?

Part of the problem is that we have misunderstood the meaning of Easter. We have made it into an event that happened to only one human being a long time ago. And the meaning of Christ’s resurrection is projected into a distant, otherworldly time to come. But this is not how the Scriptures treat the resurrection story.

Whatever the physical reality may have been, the Scriptures approach the resurrection as a deep and universal truth that operates in every corner of the Cosmos and in every human life. The power of resurrection is that it is unleashed in the places and situations that feel most hopeless, broken, and dead. And that means that Easter is exactly the season we need here and now if we are to thrive in the face of life’s little deaths.

That’s why I am so grateful to have the opportunity to share this Liturgical Guide for Easter with you:

Life After Loss
Thriving in the Face of Life’s Little Deaths

Based on the Gospel readings for Year B, Life After Loss explores how we can enter in to a lived experience of resurrection that sustains us and empowers us in the face of our grief and pain. Each chapter explores one simple practice that can help us to grief well, open to life, and stay connected with our truest selves, God, and others.

Life After Loss is far more than a journey in prayer and worship through a liturgical season. It is an invitation to a richer, deeper, healthier, and more resilient life even as we navigate the unavoidable grief in our world.

Life After Loss
is available in three options:

LIFE AFTER LOSS
Liturgical Guide includes:
● Purpose written prayers and liturgies for every Sunday from Easter Sunday to Easter 7B (including The Ascension);
● Sermon starters for every service of the series;
● Gathering, Responding, and Integrating liturgies for all services in the series;
● A theme-based Table Liturgy that can be used at any service;
● Theme-based graphics for your projection software, including welcome screens and backgrounds for song lyrics, liturgies, and sermon notes.

LIFE AFTER LOSS

Devotional Guide includes:
● Preparing, Responding, and Integrating practices for every day to help you enter into your devotional practice as deeply and mindfully as possible;

● Copies of the Sermon Starters for each service for easy reference while doing your daily practice;

● Daily reflection questions to enable you to listen more deeply to the message of the Scriptures and apply it to your life and relationships.

LIFE AFTER LOSS

Bundle includes:

Designed for communities that want to journey together, while also providing a meaningful personal journey for congregation members, the Bundle includes both the Liturgical and the Devotional Guides. It also includes a license to share the devotional guides through any or all of the following channels:

● Printed handouts to distribute to congregation members;

● Digital copies sent to members via email;

● Posted on your church's social media channels;

● Posted on your church's website.

_____________________

Life After Loss
includes the following chapters:

Easter Sunday: Keep Searching
Loss feels like the end of the world and we can’t believe we can ever find life again. As tempting as it can be to abandon the search, we can’t find our way to resurrection if we abandon the search. But if we can do just one small, potentially life-giving thing each day, we can find our way back to life.

Easter 2B: Grieve Ugly
No one knows how long we may need to grieve. The journey from grief to resurrection isn’t linear. We can return to life with our eyes still full of tears, the fist still clenching our hearts, and hope little more than a distant song on the wind. But unless we are willing to count the cost of our loss and embrace the full force of our grief, we will never truly reach resurrection.

Easter 3B: Cherish Rituals
If it’s true that we become what we habitually do, then rituals are the raw materials of our becoming. And nothing has a greater impact on who we become than the losses we endure, the griefs we express, and the resurrections we find along the way. And so, when we’re in the midst of grief, returning to or creating rituals can give us the container we need to hold our grief while we process it.

Easter 4B: Listen Carefully
When we’re navigating loss, we are vulnerable to those who would manipulate us. Grief clouds our judgment. It blunts our thinking and leaves us in survival mode in which we often want to grasp at anything that makes us feel safe. But, if we listen carefully, we will find those who are trustworthy, truly caring, and wise.

Easter 5B: Remember Yourself
When we experience loss, we often lose our connection with our truest selves. We grasp at safety and reduce ourselves to all that is needed for survival. That’s why it is often a good idea to slow down, rest, and focus on the things that are essential to who we are and how we express our lives.

Easter 6B: Prioritise Love
While love may sometimes seem impossible when we grieve, while it may feel that love has been taken from us along with everything else we have lost, it remains the most powerful healing and sustaining force.

Ascension Day: Look Up
So, when suffering, loss, pain, and grief try to convince us that our lives are over, when our eyes become affixed to the ground, and our bodies hunch over under the burden of despair, the ascension offers us the simple, difficult choice to look up. It calls us to remember the image of Jesus rising above everything that destroys life, and to remember that life and love may seem defeated for a while, but they are never destroyed.

Easter 7B: Stay Safe
Loss and grief are unavoidable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find an internal safety that can protect us and carry us through our most difficult times. Because, when we change the world within us, we change the world around us, even if nothing changes.

The last few years have felt to many of us like an endless processionof struggle, loss, and grief.

The last few years have felt to many of us like an endless procession
of struggle, loss, and grief.