A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss

 "A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss"

From Every Moment Holy, Volume I

By Ned Bustard

I have felt its approach in the back of my mind, 
O Lord, like a burden tilting
toward me across the calendar.
I have felt its long approach,
and now it has arrived.

This is the day that marks the anniversary of my loss,

and waking to it, I must drink again from the stream of

a sorrow that cannot be fully remedied in this life.

O Christ, redeem this day.

 

I do not ask that these lingerings of grief be erased, but

that the fingers of your grace would work this memory

as a baker kneads a dough, till the leaven of

rising hope transforms it from within, into

a form holding now in that same sorrow the

surety of your presence, so that when I 

look again at that loss, I see you in the deepest gloom of it,

    weeping with me,

even as I hear you whispering that

this is not the end, but only

the still grey of the dawn

before the world begins.

And if that is so, then let that which broke me upon this day

in a past year, now be seen as the beginning

of my remaking into a Christ-follower more sympathetic, 

more compassionate, and more conscious of my frailty and

of my daily dependence upon you' as one more invested

in the hope of the resurrection of the body

and the return of the King,

than ever I had been before.

Let this loss-hollowed day arrive in years to come 

as the kidding of a fire in my bones, spurring me to 

seek in this short life that which is eternal.

Let the past wound, and the memory of it, push me

to be present with you in ways that I was not before.

Do not waste my greatest sorrows, O God, but

use them to teach me to live in your presence-

fully alive to pain and joy and sorrow and hope-

in the places where my shattering

    and your shaping meet.

Amen