On Saturday, May 31st, we held our first Butterfly Celebration.  Anyone whose story has been touched by the experience of miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant loss were invited to honor and remember their babies.

This service was a time of prayer, song, and liturgy that ended with a butterfly release, an interaction with God’s creation so beautiful, so fleeting, and so blessing to experience.  One of the liturgies was Liturgy for the Death of a Dream:

O Christ, in whom the final fulfillment of all hope is held secure,

We bring to you now the weathered fragments of our former dreams,

the broken pieces of our expectations, the rent patches of hopes worn thin, the shards of some shattered image of life as we once thought it would be. 

What we so wanted has not come to pass.

We invested our hopes in desires that returned only sorrow and frustration.

Those dreams, like glimmering faerie feasts, could not sustain us,

and in our heads we know that you are Lord even over this –

over our tears, our confusion, and our disappointment.

But we still feel, in this moment, as if we have been abandoned,

as if you do not care that these hopes have collapsed to rubble.

And yet we know this is not so. We are not forsaken.

Our history bears the fingerprints of grace.

You were always faithful, though we could not always trace quick evidence of your presence in our pain, yet did you remain at work,

lurking in the wings, sifting all our splinterings for bright embers that might be breathed into more eternal dreams.

If your story has not been touched by this sort of loss, it can be difficult to understand what it is like to have to say goodbye to someone you never said hello to.  These parents are mourning everything about their child birthed into heaven. Their child’s first words, their personality, their birthday, who they were going to be.

Who better to come to in mourning this child than God, who lost his Son?