Prayers please for Carol O. who is fighting a debilitating disease and needs all of our love and prayers as does her entire family.
Prayers also for guidance for one who is seeking a way and for protection.
Prayers also for Christine and Gordon, who seem to be doing well despite profound difficulties.
Prayers for Linda and Samuel as they continue to enjoy the rolling hllls of West Virginia.
Prayers for safety in my coming trip.
Thank you.
I will soon be undergoing a temporary but major paradigm shift in domestic accommodations.
That is to say I'll be taking my vacation to SW Florida including the Ten Thousand Islands, the Everglades and the Dry Tortugas (which necessitates a brief stay in the Keys (oh, poor me. We WILL NOT, however, be staying in Key West, where one cultivates weirdness until it is merely boring).
In the course of this trip I hope to visit Ca D'Zan (the home of the Ringlings), the Winter Homes of Edison and Ford, and a number of other South Florida Venues. A real high point will be a trip to the Amish Community (!) of Sarasota to eat at the equivalent of the most marvelous restaurant on Earth--Der Dutchman in Plain City.
(Note to TSO: It's probably late for the Shekinah Glory Festival out that way, but the weekend Auctions are always interesting and the restaurant is heart-stopping in its Mennonite goodness--real cream, butter used in mashed potatoes-slow cooked green beans in real animal fat--you know all those comofort foods plus delicacies like shoo-fly pie, oatmeal pie, and date pudding--definitely worth planning for--but they close early--I don't recall if they use electric lights in the restaurant or not--the Mennonite communityt here is not as strict as the NE Amish. )
Anyway, I will be online, and probably occasionally blogging, but don't expect a lot.
Just pray for me on the trip and continue to pray for our family in our temporarily and happily separated state. (Samuel is spending the summer with Grandma and Grandpa and may be taking a little jaunt in the next week or two to the Baltimore Aquarium.)
In the category of TMI, so be warned.
Of recent date I've been amazed at just how much of a writer I am. I think I've always known this, but never really acknowledged it. Now, please note, I am not boasting, I am merely stating facts--I did not insist that I was a good writer, merely a writer, and by that I mean something very specific.
To be a writer is to have the mind of a writer. To have the mind of a writer means that you cannot help but write whether what you do is publishable or execrable. The case in point which showed this to me all too clearly arose earlier this week.
I recently had a matter I needed to discuss with my supervisor--merely a matter of differences in style that was more an offering of information that would help me feel more comfortable in my present capacity. I wrote ten drafts of an e-mail in my head and one in reality before I went in a spoke with her for about ten minutes. It was in writing these things that I was able to make concrete the grounds of our differences and the essence of what I wanted to say. Prior to that point, I was a mass of conflicts, blaming, accusing, and resenting. Once I wrote all of that out, the reality of what I needed and wanted to say became clear. The writing made clear what the feelings and motivations were--it cleared away the vapors of distraught emotions and laid bare what gave rise to them.
When I look back over my life, this has always been the case. That is to say, I often need to write about a matter before I can actually deal with it. Writing puts me in a different and differently connected realm of being. It is why I feel that I pray more with pen in hand than I do when I sit around and try to pray. Get out the Bible and a notebook and I'm off for an hour or more. Now, I may be just indulging myself in a fantasy of prayer. But I hope that God will honor the intent and, as He knows who I am, will use the gifts He has given to clarify who I am in Him. If I am not praying, then I pray that He might lead me there exactly as He sees fit. But given that nothing is clear until the words are on the page and I can read them and read beyond them, I suppose I shall keep up the practice until directed by spiritual advisor or Word of God Himself to do otherwise. I suppose one of the chief "rules" for prayer must be do what works and honors God
"As for me, I exalt my God,
and my spirit rejoices in the King of Heaven."
C.S. Lewis said, "Joy is the serious business of Heaven." Last night at Bible Study I jokingly said, "Everything comes back to the book of Phillippians." They will know we are Christians by our love, but they will know our true love by our joy. Joy is the light that shines forth and invites the world to the banquet of the lamb. Joy is the mainstay of life. A life without joy is a life not lived.
Evening Prayer
A few quiet moments now to pray before payer begins,
a moment to taste being, to listen to the rain,
Florida rain, rain in rivers not in drops and dabs,
and in all of this to see grace, to hear God.
The God who loves me, calls me His own beloved.
The same God who made the blue of ocean and sky,
who fed Elijah by the Wadi Cherith when all hope
was lost. The same God who opened his arms and died
for me as if I were the only one.
So called free verse is the stream of consciousness of the poetry world. It has its functions and purposes as in this free-form meditation. I could sculpt it into something other, but then it would not be what captured that moment. Sometimes a poem is a painting, sometimes it is a polaroid. This one is a polaroid--snapped at the time of its happening, without deliberate art or artifice, but nevertheless true for all that.
I read these words every four weeks or so on a Tuesday, perhaps more often than that. But today the meaning dawned upon me in a new way.
"King of glory, Lord of power and might, cleanse our hearts from all sin, preserve the innocence of our hands, and keep our minds from vanity, so that we may deserve your blessing in your holy place."
May it be so for all of us. In other words. Amen.
Two words that struck home particularly hard as I did this morning's prayer:
Let your splendor rest upon us today,
direct the work of our hands.
Fahter,
may everything we do
begin with your inspiration
and continue withyour saving help.
Let our work always find its origin in you
and through you reach completiion.
May everything we do find its roots in the Lord and its branches holding up the Kingdom of God, like strong pillars. I have a work to do today that is not to my liking. May God make it easy and temper it with grace, strength, humor, and conviction and may no one suffer from it.
Reading a remarkable little book by Lauren F. Winner titled Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity. And in the course of it she quotes this passage. If you aren't familiar with Amos (and who is) this is what the passage has to say:
Amos 8:11-12
11Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD:
12And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.
I'll need to spend some more time with this verse and its context, but isn't it a prophecy for today? Isn't it incredibly appropriate to our lives and times? And isn't it frightening.
There will be a famine not of bread and water, but of hearing the word of God, and people will scramble to try to find it and there will be all sorts of "interpreters of the word" ready to tell them exactly what they want to hear. But there will be no one to tell them the truth.
The most frightening part of this is that we are part of that famine. Every time we participate in something ungodly--every time we listen to gossip being spread and say nothing about it, every time we hear God being maligned and simply walk away, every time we hear the scriptures being misused, misquoted, and distorted we increase the famine of the word.
More, every time we pick up the newspaper or turn on the television set without having spent time in the Word and listening to God, every time we let a day pass without reading the scripture and sharing its good news with someone in some small way, every time we pass up an opportunity for a Bible Study or a moment of prayer because it is inconvenient, we are contributing to the famine. And our land is already skeletal and the vulture of the Prince of this world are already circling waiting for the last gasp.
"All that is required for evil to conquer is for good people to do nothing." The time for silence and for putting off our study and time with the Lord has long since passed. We must speak the truth in light, but to do so, we must know it and we can only know it if we know Jesus Christ. And finally, "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ."
When I was with the Charismatic movement, I had a gift given me that I believe was wrongly identified as prophecy. I think rather that my gift is exhortation and encouragement. And now I am exhorting and encouraging. Life is terribly, terribly short and souls stand the chance of being lost every single day. Our silence has terrible repurcussions and implications. If you cannot speak the Gospel in words, then speak it in your actions of the day. In Today's reading for Mass Jesus promised us that even so small an action as giving a cup of water would carry a great reward. Think then what the reward would be for pulling the drowning from the waters that threaten to engulf them. I know that I will make a commitment to try much harder to read scripture and live out the image of Christ they convey to the betterment of all around me. And I promise to share as much as I can of what this ultimately means.
God bless you all--now--hit the books!
I just had the most harrowing (and gratifying) encounter ever in the confessional. I had never had a priest accost me in quite the way this priest did. Apparently this man believes in the destructive power of sin. I felt like I was at the inquisition and it was wonderful. All too often, I go into the confessional and I get a priest who will tell me how what I think is a sin is not really all that sinful. This priest harangued me about the horrors of mortal sin and the path to which it led. It was frightening and exhilirating. I walked out of the confessional with a sense that I had actually participated in a Sacrament. More, the ordeal was such that any penance afterwards would be incredibly light.
But what was so nice is that Father made it very easy to step through all the various actions and thoughts and to really make a good confession. I can tell it must have been efficacious because afterwards at Mass I was seized with such an enormous anxiety attack I wanted to run out of the Church and scream. I restrained myself, nearly hyperventilating. As communion came and went the anxiety eased somewhat. I'm convinced this was simply an emotional attack to try to get me offtrack again.
Anyway, thank goodness for this priest who still believes in sin and its prevalence. He even gave a rather Savonarola-like fiery homily against sensuality and sin. This to a Mass of tourists. Very, very nice.