Eucharistic prayer cover image

Come Sunday: The Eucharistic Prayer Illuminated

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Cards by Kyle Oliver for prayr.cc (CC BY 2.0)
Images are CC0 but credited below

I’m preaching this weekend on the Eucharistic prayer, the part of the Sunday service where we bless the bread and wine that will become for us the Body and Blood of Christ.

The sermon is part of a series exploring the different parts of the liturgy. I’m thinking of the season-long experience as a kind of riff on the mystagogy portion of the historic rites of Christian initiation.

Anyway, while I was preparing the sermon, I realized I had this section that was an excruciating walk through each part of the prayer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think knowing the pieces of this prayer can make it more meaningful for us. But it does not an interesting sermon structure make.

I decided it might be nice to have a supplement to the sermon in the form of something like flashcards—not for quizzing yourself, but for reading and rearranging and playing around with. For teaching purposes, basically. (All my game design colleagues are constantly making cool cards for their projects, and this felt potentially useful and fun to try.)

My guess from the conversation on Facebook (thanks for all the feedback!) is that a fair number of you might think they could be useful too. So it sounds like my next task is to start moving forward and backward in the liturgy and try to fill out the set for the whole Sunday service.

Enough people have expressed interest in purchasing these that I’m going to think seriously about making them available as physical cards, either in the Creative Commons Prayer Store or with a production partner.

As for the purely digital, here’s what I’m going to propose:

As always, the stuff on this site is available to you for free and to reuse and remix however you like. It’s published under the least restrictive Creative Commons license, so just use the attribution line at the top of the page and you’re good.

The versions you’ll get if you right-click and save either here or on Facebook are Instagram resolution, 1080×1080 px. That’s not quite big enough if you want to DIY it at print resolution at a size I think would be readable.

So if you want them at higher resolution, or if you don’t want to bother with right-clicking and saving 18 times (and more to come?), just become a Patreon supporter at any rewards level. I just shared with Patrons a .ZIP file with all the high-res images.

If you just can’t with Patreon, you can PayPal.me whatever you think is fair (suggested: $8) and I’ll email you the download link. Feel free to wait for the full liturgy, of course, but I’m not making any promises about when I’ll get more done. If and when I do, I’ll do the suggested pricing a la carte so you’re not paying twice for this set.

OK, this is way more commerce than we usually do in this section of the blog. Time for a John Donne poem!

Related Poem

“Love (III)” by John Donne (Public Domain)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
	Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
	From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
	If I lacked anything.

“A guest," I answered, “worthy to be here”:
	Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
	I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
	“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
	Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not," says Love, “who bore the blame?”
	“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down," says Love, “and taste my meat.”
	So I did sit and eat.

Related Media

You can support Creative Commons Prayer directly on Patreon, by buying our designs on Zazzle, or by purchasing related media on Amazon.

Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer by Leonel L. Mitchell

Where I take my liturgy questions, if Kristin Saylor isn’t available.

Image Credits

All the component images in this collection are licensed CC0

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One thought on “Come Sunday: The Eucharistic Prayer Illuminated”

  1. Pingback: Teaching Sermon: The Eucharistic Prayer - Kyle Matthew Oliver

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