Send-off Blessing

Many who attended our Send-off Celebration at St. Clare asked for the text from the blessing that was prayed over our family.  It was written by my sister-in-law Carrie Meyer who recently finished her dual Masters in Divinity and Spirituality offered jointly from Bellarmine University and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.  The inner and outer beauty that Carrie and her words eminate are especially powerful given her experience from the tragic and selfless perspective as an organ donor's sibling. 

God of All Creation - who is Three in One as a speaker, word, and breath are three in one.

Loving Creator who hovered over the waters of primordial chaos and spoke words of creation;

Word Incarnate who spoke to the winds and calmed them;
Eternal Spirit rushing in at gale forces, touching our faces with gentle breezes.
You are the very Breath of Life.
It is you who animate every creature on earth with a steady inhale and exhale.
 

You breathed the Breath of Life into Pete on the day of his birth and you have sustained him in life to this day through your own Breath and your own Hands. We are thankful for the hands that have healed him and lungs – human or machine – that have supported his own. Strengthen the lungs you knit together for him in his mother’s womb that he may continue speak words of Truth to the world of You, words of Love to Eileen for You, and words of Care to Adah and Eamon about You. And if it be You Will – heal those same lungs.

 

We know you do not abandon the work of your hands. We ask you to sustain Pete in this time of waiting. Strengthen his heart and mind, calm his anxieties remind him that in all times and places we belong to you. Prepare him to receive a gift from you – a gift of healing, a gift of breath.

 

God you walked on the Earth as Jesus Christ. You wept over the death of loved ones. You coughed in the dusty streets of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and on the road to the cross. Jesus who is the ultimate healer, if it is not your will to mend what is broken, we ask for a more human miracle. We ask for a miracle both beautiful and brutal. Do what you have done over and again: bring life out of tragedy and death. Move the heart of a family in pain to choose life that Pete might have breath.

 

We pray now in advance for the death that might bring Pete breath. We pray in advance that you pour your comfort on the family who will make a selfless choice for another. Pull them to you even as the will think you far away. We pray earnestly out of our love and deep gratitude for them. Let our prayers create a space for them – this family known only to you. Let our prayers create a space of comfort in your Holy Heart, a space of stillness and peace when their hearts are wild and at war. In this space their gift of love to us will not ‘make sense’ of their loss or purport to assuage their pain, but in this space let their comfort be in You, let their consolation be in the love and relationship they still share with the one who has been taken from them.

You are a God of Good Friday and of Easter Sunday. Hold in tender care each person involved on the day when our Easter Sunday is the Good Friday of another.

 

You are the very Breath of Life.

It is you who animate every creature on earth with a steady inhale and exhale, do not abandon the work of your hands.