This litany is inspired by a reading of this week’s Gospel passage from Mark 12.

Christ, you taught us the keys to life,
The greatest commandments:
Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength;
Love our neighbors as ourselves (1).

We are asked to love Love
And to serve Love.
Teach us what this means, oh God,
And help us to do it well.

So fill us with love, oh God,
That we don’t have room for anything else.
Let us be enlarged and expanded
And awakened by Love.

Let our eyes never veer from Love,
Our hearts never stray from Love,
Our minds be fixed on Love,
Our bodies dedicated to love’s service.
And as we do the work of learning to accept and love ourselves,
Let us also accept and love our neighbors.

Let care and concern for our neighbors well-being and highest good
Be the hallmark of our work.
For these are our neighbor and our family:
The poor, the lonely, the sick, the prisoner
The underdog, the misunderstood, the ones who long,
The far-away and the beggar at our gate,
The flawed and the downtrodden
The familiar and the alien.

Love is who and Whose we are.
And love is what we do.
Amen.

Mark 12:30,31

This litany was originally written to accompany a sermon I preached at Peace of Christ church. You can find the sermon here. The sermon uses this week's Lectionary reading from Romans 7.

Loving Creator, we confess that, in general, we are bad at loving ourselves.
Help us, oh God.
Many of us have been criticized mercilessly and have simply accepted the habit of it.
Help us, oh God.

Help us to regard ourselves with the same kindness and patience
With which you regard us.
Help us to lay down our judgements of ourselves and others
And to leave the judging to you.
Help us to see ourselves and everyone around us in the light of love,
Which is your own light.
Help us to feed, nourish, care for, and live into our True Self,
Which is your love in us.

We acknowledge that we live among tensions and paradoxes that are not always easy to parse out:
    Good and evil
    Light and darkness
    Flesh and spirit
We acknowledge that our enemies are mostly unseen,
And sometimes hidden within ourselves.
We acknowledge that we must both accept ourselves as we are
And work toward transformation.
We acknowledge that you have given us authority and power over evil,
And we take hold of them in the name of Christ.

Hallelujah! For you have looked upon us with eyes full of grace
Grace is air we breathe.
Grace is the ocean we swim in.
Grace is our resting place.

Amen.