In anticipation of the full arrival of spring, here’s a liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 for those of us who are contemplating what we should grow in our gardens this year. Download the liturgy at EveryMomentHoly.com/liturgies or in the Every Moment Holy app.
A Liturgy for Gardening
Leader: O Creator who calls forth life, May this ground, and our labors here invested, yield good provision for the nourishing of both body and soul.
People: Lord, let our labors in this garden be fruitful. Lord, let our labors in this garden be blessed.
As we work the soil of this garden plot, furrowing, planting, watering, and harvesting may such acts become to us a living parable, a prayer acted out rather than spoken.
Lord, let our labors in this garden be fruitful. Lord, let our labors in this garden be blessed.
As we co-labor with you and with your creation to produce a beneficial harvest, may we find in such toil a kind of rest. May this plot of ground become a hallowed space and these hours a sacred time for reflection, for conversation with friends and family, and for fellowship with you, our Creator.
Lord, let our labors in this garden be fruitful. Lord, let our labors in this garden be blessed.
Through our tending of these your delightful creations— vegetables and fruits, beans and berries, vines and stalks and roots and flowers— renew our own tired hopes, redeem our own wearied imaginations. As we cultivate gentle order, training, pruning, weeding, and protecting, so cultivate and train our wayward hearts, O Lord, that rooted in you the forms of our lives might spread in winsome witness, maturing to bear the good fruit of grace, expressed in acts of compassionate love.
Lord, let our labors in this garden be fruitful. Lord, let our labors in this garden be blessed.
Walk with us now, O Lord, in the stillness of this tilled and quiet space, that when we venture again into the still greater garden of your world, we might be prepared by the long practice of your presence, to offer our lives as a true and nourishing provision to all who hunger for mercy and hope and meaning, a true and nourishing provision to all who hunger for you.
Lord, let our labors in this garden be fruitful. Lord, let our labors in this garden be blessed.
Amen.