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A LITANY OF THANKS
O God, our true life, in whom and by whom all things live, who by Your spirit commands us to seek You, and are ever ready to be found; to know You is Life, to serve You is freedom to praise You is the joy and happiness of the soul.
We praise You and give thanks for Your greatness
For seasons of bounty and of beauty, for nights of quiet sleep, for days of health, for the glory of the earth and its ministry to our need;
We bless You, O God,
For all the generations before us who, through effort and pain, have wrought so that we might be heirs of liberty and truth and peace;
We thank You, and pray that we may enter into this heritage.
For new hopes of fairer life and nobler freedoms that stir the hearts of many people today;
We praise You, O God.
For the discipline that enriches, for the burden that strengthens, for the failure that is true success, and for the sorrow that enlarges the soul;
We give You thanks, O God,
For the soul, and its powers, for strong desires to fashion ourselves after Your likeness, and all our world into new orders of beauty and right;
We rejoice and give You thanks, and to You be the honor and the glory, worlds without end.
LITANY OF LOVE
O God, the source of all being and all joy, let Your blessings be upon us, and fill us with Your love.
From all jealousy and envy, from all unkindness, from offence given or taken, from unrighteous anger and an impatient spirit, from a hard and unforgiving temper, and from evil-speaking,
O God, deliver us.
From all ambition and greed which bring want and distress to multitudes and debase the bodies and souls of many, shutting from them the fulness of life.
O God, deliver us.
From an unquiet and discontented spirit, from despondency and gloom, from doubts of Your boundless love, and from forgetfulness of the manifold goods of Life,
O God, deliver us.
Inspire in us that spirit which suffers long and is kind; which envies not; vaunted not itself, is not puffed up; which does not behave unseemly, and seeks not its own.
Grant us to be filled with the fulness of Your spirit.
Quicken in us that charity which is not easily provoked, which thinks no evil, which rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; the charity which never fails;
That so by Your grace we may establish good will upon the earth.
O God, the Father and Mother of us all, who has breathed Your own spirit into Your children and made us to be one with each other as members of Your household: enable us to make Your house a refuge for every wounded spirit, a home for every aspiring soul.
Amid diversities of knowledge and of faith, may we be one in spirit, in affection, and in devotion to You.
