Recently I was asked to write prayers for a camp week in another Episcopal Diocese. I felt honored to be asked and accepted gratefully. Their theme for the week is “Creation” — how God interacts with it, especially water. They’ll be using the Thanksgiving over the Water from the Baptismal service in the Book of Common Prayer (pages 306-70) to focus their theme. That gave me quite a bit of material to work with.
Then I suddenly realized I would be writing prayers for kids just out of 3rd grade!
A reflection by Christina Brennan Lee for July 6, 2025.
I had an immediate brain freeze, and not the kind you get when you bite into something deliciously frozen!
I read and re-read the Baptismal service, the Creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, and this old brain began trying out phrasing and imaging that might fit into 9- & 10-year-old minds.
After sending off the prayers, I found I really haven’t finished with thinking about Creation for myself.
I’ve been back into my own childhood fascination with different trees and flowers and weeds, how worms burrow, the way bees travel, and the excitement of seeing the first lightning bugs/fireflies of summer. I regret having murdered untold numbers of the latter in mayonnaise jars with holes punched into the lids. As for the natural disaster parts of earthly life, all we can do is pray for those caught up in them and all who are giving aid.
All of these musings reminded me of a poem in another prayer book that I hadn’t thought of it in quite a while. So I invite you into your own moments of creative contemplation of God’s Creation and how we, with God, interact in it. It’s a lovely piece to spend some time with as a meditation, a prayer, or just to expand our internal field of vision of all we see and experience through a window in a rainstorm, a lovely breeze on a summer day, dandelions gone to seed and wisping through the air, the musical chirping, the cawing, and the buzzing, flapping wings, bunnies and barking dogs, and so very much more, even those annoying mosquitoes (really God, mosquitoes?).
The Lake of Beauty
by Edmund Carpenter,
from A New Zealand Prayer Book [pg 157]
Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world,
and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires,
all that your Nature so specially fits for you –
that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole,
for you.
It will surely come to you.
Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come.
All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference.
Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in that,
lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still;
And let them become clear, so clear – so limpid, so mirror-like;
at last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful beauty,
and the antelope shall descend to drink and to gaze at her reflected image,
and the lion to quench his thirst,
and Love himself shall come and bend over and
catch his own likeness in you.
_____________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Every week, Christina Brennan Lee writes the Prayers of the People we use in our worship services on Sundays. She also leads weekday prayer services and serves on the SsAM Vestry. Click here to see her People’s Prayers website.
For more than 25 years, Christina Brennan Lee was a consultant/trainer in the areas of Interpersonal Skills, Conflict Management, Communications, Strategic Planning, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, etc. She has been a consultant to and has been employed in Corporate, Non-Profit, Public/Govt, Educational, and Religious organizations around the US including the Episcopal Diocese of Delaware. Currently through writing, small group facilitation, and the occasional seminar or retreat, she works in the areas of prayer, spirituality, and adult Christian Education. She has an MA in Religious Studies and Vatican Diploma as Teacher of Religion from St. Charles Borromeo School of Theology, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania; BA, AS, Psychology and Human Resource Management from Widener University, Chester, PA; and a Certificate in Non-Profit Management, University of Delaware, Newark, DE.
