Hear Our Prayer

Dear Lord, we need your presence now.

Be with those of us who doubt both our actions and our inaction

Who wonder if our small gestures still matter in a world of big problems

Who don’t know where to look for guidance

Lord, in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

Be with those of us who search for where legality and morality meet

Who question allegiances and loyalties

Who seek to find truths to ground us

Lord, in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

Be with those of us who fear losing what binds us together

Who feel our relationships breaking apart

Who lack a place where it’s safe to say what we think

Lord, in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

Be with those of us trying to protect our children 

Who struggle to impart knowledge without overwhelming them with fear

Who have no place to rest from the worry

Lord, in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

Be with those of us who see no way forward

Who find our anger turning into hatred

Who feel our impatience turning into intolerance

Lord, in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

Comfort us, Lord.  Embrace us with your love and compassion, spread your wisdom and strength over and around us, and grant us your peace.  Amen.

Barbara Ryther

Image: Melanie Kyer

Spark

In her long life, my mother sewed a hundred fabric bags. .

When filled with oats and heated they stay warm for hours.

We still have several, treasured more than gold.

I used to keep one at my feet on winter nights. 

But now I hold it tight in my arms instead.

I sink into its warmth as if it were my mother’s heart.

Exuding protection from the storms of life.

My feet are cold, but in this moment, my heart needs it more.

Above all, friends, remember:  Guard your heart.

Be mindful when your spirit needs renewal.

Turn away from icy winds that reach to steal your joy.

Throughout the dark of Lent, be sure your inner flame stays lit. 

Shelter it fiercely, feed it tinder when you can: 

A chocolate kiss, a cuddle from a pet. 

Allow the Holy Spirit to breathe softly on the embers of your soul.

Only the nurtured spark survives to pass its warmth to others.

And others, oh so many, need your spark. 

Melanie Kyer

February 7, 2026

I look for leadership and see lies

I look for justice and see prejudice

I look for mercy and see mockery

Cruelty is not a strength

Fear is not a foundation

Hatred is not a virtue

Hatred has a face 

And a voice

And targets

Targets whose names I know

Even if I didn’t

I cannot be above the fray

There is no shelter above the fray

Above the boiling water

Is scalding steam

This is not a time for complacency

Or patience

Or a safe retreat

This is a time for radical love

Love wrenched out of our souls

Love that pierces through the noise

We must be the face of love

The voice of love

The prayer of love

Humanity cannot be divided into them and us

We are all in God’s image

Or none of us are

For the love of God…

Image: Barbara Ryther

The Gift of the Mage

The mage packed for the journey, sending his wife to pick out a present.

“Who is this for, anyway?”

“A baby.”

“So… a blanket? Tapestry?”

“He’s supposed to be the Messiah, maybe? A king? That’s what the prophecies say.”

“Better bring something fancy then. Here, some frankincense. My aromatherapist swears by it. 

Good for the joints, and brain health. Kings need to be nimble and smart.”

After a tiring journey with his fellow magi, the mage set down the gleaming bottle in front of the baby and his parents. If it weren’t for his precise calculations, he would have thought he was in the wrong place. A scruffy man and young girl here in a barn with a newborn wrapped in old scraps surrounded by animals and shepherds. This frankincense would surely be sold for food.  

The shepherds didn’t belong here either– weren’t they usually hermits? They told him about being visited by a host of angels and…well, it sure did sound crazy. But it was they who convinced him they were all in the right place. It takes a lot for shepherds to leave their sheep. 

So he sat, careful not to soil his fine robes. The other magi did the same, taking in the scene and slowly realizing that this baby wasn’t like any king they had visited before. In the hush of the spirit, they knew. This baby, this moment, was something bigger than all of them. 

The Prince of Peace. Finally.  After so many years of hatred and conflict.  If they could keep the despot Herod from harming the baby, all would be well.

He worshipped the little child, filled with awe and thankfulness that his own children would finally live in a world of peace.

Melanie Kyer

January 06, 2026

Image: Kathryn Yingst

GRACE

I sometimes joke that if I ever win Megabucks I am going to start a foundation called “The Undeserved Grace Foundation.” This always leads my sister Laura to remind me that Grace, the love of God, freely given to his children is always undeserved.

We grew up in the Lutheran church, where Grace is a concept central to Martin Luther’s teaching. When Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, he was protesting against the idea that you can buy your way into heaven faster, or perhaps get a seat closer to Jesus at the big table. 

I don’t think that’s what Jesus taught either. When I try to understand the parables, I believe the meaning Jesus is trying to convey is that God loves the Samaritan, the sick, the people of different social status, and sent his son to freely do so—as well as heal the sick. At its most basic level I believe it means that I, in my comfortable home, am no better than someone who is a homeless drug addict. The old phrase “There but for the Grace of God go I” is not just a platitude, it has meaning and a message of importance.

Nor do I know, even if I want to believe that my ideas about the state of affairs in York, in Maine, in the United States, the Middle East or the rest of the world are what God wants. I don’t think my neighbor does either. I can do my best to interpret what Grace means when I lack for nothing. I look for guidance from those more schooled in Christian theology to help me understand what I don’t.

So, if God’s grace is given freely to all his children and Jesus told us that again and again, then it stands to reason we must love and respect others. In the current climate of unrest that’s difficult. Remember that the gift of Grace, showered upon my enemies as well as my loved ones, is worth remembering, especially this time of the year.   

Barbara Kautz, October 2025

CLIQUE

Sound bites

Snap shots

Snapchat

We summarize one another

Instantly

With laser precision

So graphic

To pin one another

On X

Life in caricature

Neighbors by category

Left

Right

White

(Is she my neighbor

After that visa oversight?)

“Who are you?”

We ask

Barely listening

For a reply—

We simply need

A label—

Membership applies

“You are not like us!”

We insist

Too liberal

Too CIS

So many colors

Can’t coexist

“Do you live by our creed?”

Assimilation is required 

If only, like a drug

To soothe our need—

A tribe

A band of brothers

Becomes our high

But is it brotherhood

Or is the bond

A brand

We seek to blaze

Regardless

Of the scar it makes?

Kathryn Yingst

10.04.25

Image: Melanie Kyer

“Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they?  And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life?” –  Matthew 6: 26-27 

When you get older, you start paying more attention to the birds. You just do. But children love them too, why else would so many childhood crafts involve making birdhouses or little feeders out of pinecones? When I was little, I loved to watch the chickadees with my grandfather, who was crazy over them. He had a trough feeder right next to the window in his sunroom and they’d gather in droves there. An artist friend of his once offered him money to kill one for him so he could examine it in more detail for his paintings. Although my grandfather was a hunter, he refused. He could never kill one of his beloved chickadees. 

Chickadees are by far my favorite birds, too. Not bright and colorful like the bold cardinal, or elusive and cheery like the bluebird, nor boisterous and aggressive like the woodpecker, their ubiquitous monochrome is consistent and unassuming. They are not the bird you search longingly for on your birding bingo card, but I love them. They are the perfect bird for our home state of Maine, hardy and just a bit cheeky. They know the winter is coming, but they are unafraid and do not flee– they just persist.

There is a lot to be anxious about these days, but as I spend a quiet golden hour enjoying the beauty of the trees and the birds on my deck, I hope I can summon their peace, lose some anxiety and practice persistence. 

-Melanie Kyer

September 20, 2025

Wings

No one tells you

When you move your child to college

About the next day

When the house is quiet

And her room lies empty

But the door is closed

So you pretend

For a moment

She is still there

Laughing

Talking on the phone 

Leaving crumbs

How will they see her?

Will they see her beautiful wings

Glossy and new

How they love the light

Iridescent with promise?

Will they throw shadows

And break her heart?

Or will they become co-conspirators 

Of joy

Kindred journeyers

Seeking pizza and movies

And friendship?

Yes.

The day after

You feel it in your bones.

The beginning

Of the shift.

When the wind rises

Gathering her

To the nest’s edge

And she learns

For the first time

How it feels

To fly.

Kathryn Yingst

08.18.25

Image: Barbara Ryther

Moored

Image: Sudie Blanchard

Lord, you provide the strong warp threads of our lives–
Family, friends, love, trust…anchors that support us.
Each day, we weave the varied weft threads…
Rainbows of color and texture:
Shades of gold and red–bright colors of joy and gladness
Darker hues of gray and black for sorrows and sadnesses
Steady strands of blue and green for more ordinary times…
All woven together, day by day.
At the end of our days, our fabric finished,
May all our patterns please you.

Image:Barb Kautz

About Teenagers, With and Without Feathers

In the early spring a pair of birds built a nest in an old gray, bike helmet hanging on the wall of our garage. Next to it hangs another bike helmet, this one with a pink visor, too old, and too small for my 17 year old granddaughter to use.

A few days later the female bird lay four eggs. The pair took turns searching for meals  while the other bird sat on the eggs. About two weeks later three of the four eggs hatched. When the birds seemed to have flown the nest the mother laid a second foursome of eggs. Meanwhile, more birds—or was it the original pair?—built a second nest in the second helmet.

One afternoon, I sat in the garage waiting for Jim so we could go out to dinner. While I waited, I was entertained by a bird I thought was not yet fully grown hovering on the edge of the gray helmet. It jumped back and forth between the two helmets, flew out of the garage, back into it, then from one helmet to another. Over and over again. I wasn’t sure whether or not there were still babies in the gray helmet. It seemed as though the bird would not return to its nest.

The bird reminded me of teenagers. Testing  their wings then flying home, not quite ready or able to fly. Ready to leave school. Or not. I’d been living with a new high school graduate and raised her mother, aunt, and uncle. So whether or not I was correct about the bird’s age it made me laugh.

When I was a young parent I knew enough about growth and development not to be overly concerned by my teenagers’ testing of wings. I wonder, though, about Joseph and Mary. Luke’s Gospel describes Jesus chiding his parents for not understanding why they thought he was lost when they left Jerusalem. He wasn’t concerned. Accounts of Jerusalem under Roman rule rightfully give credence to Mary and Joseph’s fears. Jesus’s reply, asking them why they didn’t understand he was in his father’s house has always seemed a little cheeky to me. Just like that of a teenager.

And like most of us,  Joseph and Mary, forgive and forget their son. Or should it be, that we like Joseph and Mary, most of us forgive and forget our teenagers, hoping they’ll fly at the proper time. 

Barb Kautz

August, 2025

Image: Melanie Kyer

Moonlight Prayer

Never forget: 

There is light in the darkness.

There is sun after rain.

There is morning after night.

God will not let the darkness last.

God’s rainbow promises the rain will stop.

God’s hand spins dusk into the dawn.

But also know:

The God who numbers stars has made your hands

To hold a torch against the dark we see,

To bring a rainbow to the gray of pain,

To light a fire of hope to warm cold hearts.

God grant in us the courage and the strength

To rise with new resolve when morning dawns,

To feel your universe awake in us,

And through our hearts and hands your light be done.

Melanie Kyer

Image: Kathryn Yingst

A Prayer For Hunt, Texas 

Raise your voices

Through the trees

Around each curve

Of limbs

Of water

That every space

Is found

Is filled

With presence

Persistent

Until each Mystic child

Is reunited

Into the arms

Of her beloveds

Though mothers

Wear their grief

Like crowns of thorns

At least

At last

May they hold their daughters

Like a meadow

Holds flowers

Vastly

Deeply

And devastatingly beholden

To their fierce

And fragile

Glory. 

-Kathryn Yingst

July 2025

Image: Barbara Ryther

Waiting

Far below the canopy

beneath the understory

the fern waits

Liquid blue reflections

hint enigmatically at

the bright sky above

Hidden lakes of lily-of-the-valley

scent the heavy shadows

that weave around it

Until for a fraction of an hour

the sun breaks through

and pours down light

A halo of life giving energy

a blaze of bright green

deep within the forest

Then the sun moves on

but the fern remains

savoring the blessed feast

And far below the canopy

beneath the understory

the fern waits again

-Barbara Ryther

Image: Barbara Ryther

 Spring

Image:Staff 

THE TELLING OF THE RESURRECTION

I subscribe to a writing organization whose aim is to encourage members to write about memories that might otherwise not be shared with family or friends. One week the suggested topic was to describe what your mother was like when you were a child. After I’d written down three things, I decided to ask my two sisters to text me their answers to that question. Of the nine descriptors, only one appeared on all three lists: Mum’s love of singing. Others were listening to classical music, dancing around the kitchen when she cooked, and her willingness to partner with our dad in making some of his schemes come to life. Taken as a whole, we wrote about her kindness, how she made almost all her daughters’ clothes, pasteurizing milk from a local farm. Her willingness to forgive and forget and to laugh at herself. 

I wasn’t surprised by any of the answers because they were my memories, too. But as our text messaging continued, I realized that the details of exactly what we remembered weren’t.  Once, when I was a teen, Daddy convinced Mom to fashion a plastic swimming pool cover in an effort to extend our Western Pennsylvania’s September swimming season.  Once in place, Daddy turned the cover into a “pool house,” keeping it air-filled with an industrial blower. I remembered that it sorta worked. But I’d forgotten how after the first thunderstorm “the bubble” escaped its brick moorings and  blew  into our neighbor’s yard 50 feet away. But my sisters did not, even though their memories were not precisely the same.

And so, it is with the Resurrection story. It used to bother me that the four Gospels tell slightly different versions of what happened that first Easter morning. Shouldn’t they be completely alike? But when I started writing Memoir, I realized just how much the same event seen through different eyes can vary. Just like my sisters’ and mine did. 

The more I read about writing memoir versus biography, the more I learned that variations in the telling of a story give it credence and not the other way around. If all four Gospel stories of the Resurrection, whether it’s who got to the tomb first or the appearance of  angels were told verbatim it would make the Easter story more like a memorized poem than a real event. Something that often bothers unbelievers, as it once did me.

Scholars may argue for many more centuries over who was first on the scene. That’s not the important part. What is, is He is Risen.

Indeed.

 Barbara Kautz

Image: Melanie Kyer

How does Lent work in Australia

When the days are getting dark?

When the promise of new life

Is still seasons away?

How does Lent provide its promise

For the unjustly detained

Who sit wondering if Jesus

Died to set them free, too?

How does Lent make sense to mourners

With nothing more to give up?

For whom Easter joy and rebirth

Is purely theoretical?

It’s easy to see hope in tulips

To have faith in greening buds

To endure the momentary dark

Secure that it’s only 40 days.

But even when the tulips fail to bloom,

And news brings only never ending dread.

The call to us is clear: Believe! Persist!

His day will come. Light always follows dark.

Melanie Kyer

March 2025

Image: Barbara Ryther

Adventures in Weaving

I have recently begun teaching myself to weave.

I had hoped it would be a meditative process – the soothing repetition of gently guiding yarn over and under the warp threads on a loom, the concentration of trying more complicated patterns, the creative glow of experimenting with different materials.  The ultimate meditative practice of emptying your head of everyday thoughts and being in the present.  A suitable journey for Lent.

It. Is. Not. Going. Well.

Granted, any creative process can involve a certain amount of chaos, in the best sense of discovering the unexpected.  And of course learning anything takes time and mistakes before you can even begin to consider that you might possibly know what you are doing.

But this experience has been less a creative artisan at work and more a fretful toddler who stubbornly insists that she DOES NOT NEED A NAP!

The chaos that climbed from the world into my head has fractured my already fleeting attention span, and my thoughts whiplash so rapidly that I choose and abandon my assortment of materials before they even begin to form a pattern.

The tension that moved from my head to my shoulders crawls down to my hands, making them tense and twitchy.  Warp threads cringe at my touch, abandoning their orderly vertical alignment and tightening into a stranglehold on the weft.

This is the opposite of meditation.  It’s more like possession.  Rather than clearing my mind it is exposing it for the swirling repository of worry and anxiety that it has become.

And yet, I have hope.  Hope and – dare I say it? – patience.  Perhaps it’s good to expose what is possessing me, to see it in all its three dimensional messiness, to bring it into the light.  To name it for what it is, or rather what it isn’t.  It isn’t me.  It’s something I have let live in my head and affect the rest of my body.  I can’t do calm in the midst of chaos, so one of them has to go.  The chaos can no longer be given that much space in my head or my life.

So I’m trying to let it go, one twitchy thread at a time.  Slowly but surely I will make space for calm.  I will re-warp my loom.  I will pick up one type of weft material at a time, and feel it in my hands as I gently weave it over and under the warp threads, letting the warp and weft gently mesh until they create something more than either of them alone.  Something I can’t see yet, even in my mind, but something that will be new and unique.  And me. 

-Barbara Ryther

Image: Nina Bisognani

Soup for the Soul

During the winter months

Images of steamy soups fill my mind.

A lovingly prepared hot soup brings warmth to cold, stormy days

And cheer to simple meals shared with others. 

Beef stew was a favorite during my childhood.

But there is nothing that warms my heart

Like my husband’s homemade chicken soup.

Made every fall and kept in the freezer in small batches;

We heat it up it for dinner throughout the winter, 

Whenever colds and flu threaten our health.

I believe it has healing power.

The healing power of warm soup in winter 

Reminds me of an even greater source of strength

That can help us through the difficult times we face

In our world today, as well as troubles in our personal lives.

It is the spiritual soup that fills our souls when we pray together. 

In spiritual soup, music is a main ingredient. 

We sing songs of thankfulness and praise.

One hymn, composed by Christian songwriter Lanny Wolfe in 1977

Was inspired by Matthew, 18:20, “Where two or three are gathered

together in my name, there I am in their midst.”

The well-loved song, “Surely the Presence of the Lord” (is in this place),

Is sung by the entire congregation in a church I often attend during winter months.

Like a warm soup, it lifts our hearts and sustains us through the days to come.

Perhaps we could create our own spiritual soups in these dark times, when our

Inner selves most need nourishment. Lift our voices to God in song. Spiritual soup has 

Healing power.

-Nina Bisognani

Come to the Table