For International Day of Friendship, 30th July
“When you are lost in your own life.
When the landscape you have known falls away.
When your familiar path becomes foreign
and your find yourself a stranger
in the story you had held most dear.
Then let yourself be lost.
Let yourself leave
for a place whose contours you do not already know,
whose cadences you have not learned by heart.
Let yourself land on a threshold
that mirrors the mystery of your own bewildered soul.
It will comes as a surprise,
what arrives to welcome you through the door,
making a place for you at the table
and calling you by your name.
Let what comes, come.
Let the glass be filled.
Let the light be tended.
Let the hands lay before you
what will meet you in your hunger.
Let the laughter.
Let the sweetness that enters the sorrow.
Let the solace that comes as sustenance
and sudden, unbidden grace.
For what comes, offer gladness.
For what greets you with kindly welcome, offer thanks.
Offer blessing for those who gathered you in
and will not be forgotten –
those who, when you were a stranger,
made a place for you at the table
and called you by your name.”
Welcoming Blessing by Jan Richardson
