Over the next few months we will continue to regularly share favorite prayers from our Book of Common Prayer (BCP). If you have a favorite you’d like to recommend, please let me know! ([email protected])
Today’s prayer, A General Thanksgiving, is the favorite of two of our community members, Donn Mitchell and Denise Hibay. It can be found in the Prayers and Thanksgiving portion of the BCP, pp. 814-841:
Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have
done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole
creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life,
and for the mystery of love.We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for
the loving care which surrounds us on every side.We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best
efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy
and delight us.We thank you also for those disappointments and failures
that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the
truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast
obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying,
through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life
again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and
make him known; and through him, at all times and in all
places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.
(BCP, p. 836)
Denise says: “One prayer that I go to again and again, in good times and bad, is this General Thanksgiving. Praying this quietly or reciting it out loud instantly shifts my perspective, opens my heart, and reminds me that God is everywhere in my life.”
Donn writes: “The first two paragraphs are comforting and centering. However, it is the third and fourth paragraphs which have deeply affected me and which I keep coming back to. After about 30 years of relying on these two concepts, I thought of them immediately when I first encountered Eleanor Roosevelt’s nightly prayer, which includes the line “Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to thee for strength.” Like the General Thanksgiving, Eleanor’s prayer seems to recognize that all our work, successful or not, begins and ends in God, a concept which also resonates with the second closing prayer in the Rite II Eucharist, ‘…send us out to do the work you have given us to do.’”
Amen!
