One: My friends we live in a broken world, aching from the wounds in our lives, communities, country, and the whole inhabited earth. 

We meet the abundance of your creation with exploitation and deprivation;

We meet the peace that passes all understanding with war and violence;

We meet the love that knows no borders with exclusion and hate;

We meet your boundless grace with judgment and revenge.

All :

In the presence of your peace,

in the confidence of your love,

we confess our failings and wrongs,

turning from that which harms ourselves,

our neighbours, and you. 

One: Meet us in our brokenness, loving God

All: And journey with us on the path to healing and hope.

Jennifer Henry

One: Creator God you loved us into being, blessing us with gifts of diversity and abundance, 

All: Draw us together as community, in gratitude and grace.

One: Christ Jesus you came among us, infusing the ordinary with holiness.

All: Open our hearts to your extravagant love.

One: Spirit Song you dance with and through us, inspiring possibility and hope.

All: Enliven our faith and embolden our justice.

One: Blessed Trinity, we come to worship you.

Jennifer Henry

Living God we come together, with words of commitment, and hymns of praise.  May this time renew our spirits, so that confident in you, and emboldened by one another, we might return to the world in strength and grace. Inspire us to be faithful friend, generous neighbour, bold disciple, and daring advocate, encouraged by this community and your abiding love.  In the name of the Holy One who came down.  Amen       

Gracious God, you come among us in abundant joy, unsettling truth, deep consolation, and powerful transformation.  Yours are winds of change, hastening us toward a kin-dom of inclusion and justice not yet known in this world.  Move and mold us.  Convert and transform us.  Through your many witnesses, show us your way, so that we may be a community that embodies your love, here and now.    Amen 

When we journey with Jesus this week, let the humble one on a donkey remind us to reject the logic of empire and hold fast to the other way, making our witness public, living our lives as a prayer.

When we journey with Jesus this week, let the cross remind us that there is no brutality or repression, no betrayal or abandonment—nothing in the horrors of this world—that our God does not know, that our God does not feel. In the depths of our personal grief and pain, in breadth of the world’s sorrow, God has been, is and will be with us. We are never alone.

When we journey with Jesus this week, let the empty tomb remind us that neither hate nor cruelty, not violence, not even death, reign supreme. Those who wage terror are not king. The kin-dom of God, the beloved community rises in the midst of struggle. Because Christ is Risen, true transformation is always possible.

Words: Jennifer Henry
2026

Prayer for Ash Wednesday

We are dust–

cosmic remnant of stars,

soot glistening in the sunlight,

embers flickering warmth,

dark fertile soil.

We are stuff that matters,

one, with all our relations,

as common and extraordinary

as is the Earth.

Creator, we are dust,

and to You–our home–we shall return.

Amen.

Words: Jennifer Henry

2021

Pancake Grace

Ordinary blessings…milk and flour, an egg and a bit of butter.  The ingredients of joy are common things that with a little sweetness combine in humble celebration.  The sugary taste of maple, the comfort of a place at the table, tender hands in shared service, hearfelt memories, and the precious sound of children’s laughter.  In times of grief and pain, may we help one another feast on the joy of common grace.   May gratitude and compassion shape bold discipleship until ordinary blessings are shared by all. Amen

Words: Jennifer Henry
Image: Unsplash, Mae Mu

February 17, 2026

Prayer for Minnesota

Holding the people of Minnesota in the light after another murder today as the terror of ICE continues to reign at the behest of the President.  In the midst of this grief and pain, may the light of truth, compassion, justice, solidarity and human dignity burn brighter and brighter.  I see it in the witnesses, protestors, and clergy on the streets.  I discern it in some leaders of integrity striving to protect the targeted and marginalized against tyranny. I hear it in the words sung by neighbours to other neighbours who are staying in their houses in real fear.  I feel it in the solidarity pouring in from farther and farther afield.  This light may flicker but it will persevere. We are with you.

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

 January 24, 2026

This year,

may our intentions bloom

in undeterred compassion,

unanticipated kindness,

unprecented justice,

and unexpected joy.

We pray to the God

of surprising hope.

Amen

Words: Jennifer Henry

Image: Jessica Fadel Unsplash

January 2026

One: Dear Friends, we gather in a time of great turmoil, war spreading, a world in crisis, to rekindle our hope.  In the midst of us, through the presence of God in community, that fire for justice and peace, that flame of hope, can be found in the here and now.  Our challenge is to carry it beyond these walls.  We nurture and guard that flame, but then, we take it out into the night.

Advent 1: We light this lantern to affirm a peace found not in armaments but in the justice of shared abundance.

All: We carry deep peace within.

Advent 2: We light this lantern to affirm a dignity found not in superiority but in equality.

All: We illuminate God’s image in all.

Advent 3: We light this lantern to affirm a hope found not in innocence but in resistance.

All: We ignite the flame of justice

Advent 4: We light this lantern to affirm a joy found not in folly but in truth.

All: We embolden God’s delight.

Christmas Eve: We light this lantern to affirm our love for the ever-living child of peace born this day and every day in the heart of communities of hope and struggle.

All: We celebrate that Love came down.  Emmanuel, God is with us.

Jennifer Henry

Thanksgiving

Return kindness to the sun and the moon and the stars.  Return kindness to the mountains and the deserts and the waters.  Return kindness to the swimmers and the flyers and the fur bearing ones.  Return kindness to all living things.  May we show gratitude to the Creator through respect of the earth and kindness to the beings we are placed among.  May thanksgiving transform our hearts and gratitude ground our hopeful action.

Words and image:Jennifer Henry

October 2025

Missing Sisters

This year as remains of precious sisters and daughters were found in landfills we were poignantly reminded of the terrible ongoing reality of #MMIWG2S.  May all across this country, all levels of government, law enforcement, and the service sector, dedicate renewed efforts to understanding and implementing the Calls to Justice of the Final Report of the National Inquiry.  May we honour the dead, grieve with the living, seek the missing, and commit our nation to change.

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

May 4, 2025

Holy Week Reflection

This year as I journey into this story of betrayal and suffering, of God broken among us, by us, of the power of divine solidarity, I am holding in my heart the refugees and migrants of this world–those fleeing in fear, those deported, detained or disappeared, those wrenched from family, those abandoned to political whims, those made some kind of perverse example to show absolute power. Human callousness and cruelty towards displaced, uprooted, migrant or undocumented persons seems at a fevered pitch.

What you do to these, you do to me…says the One who himself was undocumented, a refugee who fled in the night, says the One whose absolute empathy, whose emptying of power, meant his death.

May this story, this year, transform the coldest and hardest of hearts, uproot systems of tyranny and hate …The Easter promise pulls us from the future. May we journey towards it in compassion, and in profound hope.

Words: Jennifer Henry (2025)

Into this now,

this night,

this world You come.

Vulnerable,

beautiful,

impossible Hope.

Sink deep into our worried hearts.

Inhabit our wounded lands.

Unsettle our established injustice.

Find us, Blessed Christ Child.

Find us. Amen.

Words: Jennifer Henry (December 2024)

Image: Greyson Joralemon, Unsplash

This Holy Week pain is agonizingly real. Betrayal, repression, and murder feel ever present.  We war, rage and grieve. This Holy Week…may we feel as deeply the coming of dawn, rising of peoples, transformation of the impossible, and hopes burst into peace.  Holy One, make resurrection real in our crucified world, we pray. AMEN.

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

March 2024

Creator of the Great Diversity

Help us to proclaim Your extravagant grace

embody Your radical justice

and be a living sacrament of Your immeasurable and limitless love.

Amen

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

March 14, 2024

Sister Spirit,
You are the beat in our drums, the harmony in our songs, the spring in our steps, the roll in our wheels, and the passion in our words. Live within and amongst the women of the world. Disturb the systems that exploit and exclude. Inhabit our struggles and enliven our movements. Link us to one another in deep solidarity until there is bread for all. And, yes, there are roses too. Amen.
Words: Jennifer Henry 2024
Image: Vonecia Carswell (Unsplash)

Prayer to Bring the Rain

Creator,  we are gripped with fear and grief as the fires rage among us.  We pray for all who risk their lives to battle these blazes, all who have been displaced, all who live in greater and greater anxiety.

In this time, hear our words of love for your beautiful creation.

In this time, hear our words of gratitude for cool lakes, strong rivers, and welcome rains.

In this time, hear our words of repentance for the harm to your precious earth. 

Hear our call to you:

Bring the rains like a healing balm. 

Bring comfort for all our relations.

Bring our hearts towards a justice that rolls like a river.

In humility and love we pray,

Amen

August 2023

One: We are here,
Voices strong, bodies proud, hearts bold.
Living testimony to your great diversity,
Sign and sacrament of your loving justice,
For such a time as this.
All: We rise in love seeking justice.

One: We acknowledge
The ways in which we have failed,
Failed to take in the fulness of your love
To believe the breadth of your grace
To see the rainbow colours of Your hope.
All: We breathe in humility seeking hope.

One: We repent
From the traditions that constrain Your promise
The use of texts to demean and abuse
Mission that distorted Your radical welcome
All: We turn from hate seeking change.

One: We celebrate
The unfolding mystery of Your presence,
Communities learning and transforming,
Movements of rites and rights that change the world
All: We open in faith seeking transformation.

One: We pray in the name of the Three in One God,
Ever in relationship,
Risking daring creation, intimate solidarity, prophetic love.
All: Amen

Words: Susie Henderson and Jennifer Henry, 2022

Mothering

Creator, we give thanks for all those who mother in diverse and wonderful ways. We celebrate opportunities to gather and lament the distance that might be between us at this time. May we find words and ways to express our gratitude. 

We pray:

Encircle us in your transforming love.

For the mothers who build peace all around the world that the lives of their children might be transformed. For the mothers of Russians and Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians, all who daily  resist making enemy.  May the origins of this day be honored with deepened commitment to peace.

We pray:

Encircle us in your transforming love.

For those seeking to mother who are denied, for those who grieve their mothers, for mothers who grieve their children, and for those for whom the word “mother” is pain and not comfort. May your story be honoured.

We pray:

Encircle us in your transforming love.

For our Mother the earth, wounded by our neglect and excess. For her resilience and capacity to redeem, regenerate, and resurrect.  May we learn from what she teaches about how to truly live.

We pray:

Encircle us in your transforming love.

We lift all these prayers to you, Creator. With  Mothering love, receive our prayers.

Amen

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

May, 2022