Setting my alarm

I’ve once again set my phone alarm clock to buzz every morning at 8:45. I first set this alarm after the shootings at Sandy Hook school in Newtown in December 2012. I had the alarm set for a long while but then lapsed into skipping it, then forgetting, and then the new habit was gone. Then came the Boston marathon in April 2013, and I set it again. I set it again after the Charleston shooting in 2015. Each time, I confess, I've let the practice eventually fade. After Uvalde, it’s time to set it again. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, please follow this link to a short essay I wrote for the “Good Letters” blog of Image Journal back in 2013. Then, please, would you also set your alarm?

~~~

[Photo: taken of a toy dinosaur, no doubt lovingly placed, on a retaining wall I sometimes pass when I walk.]

Overwhelmed with mercy

Here’s another gem—another of many—from the gospel of Luke (Message version): "God had overwhelmed her with mercy."

May it be so for each of us.

If you don't know how to pray for another person, pray that they be under God's mercy, overwhelmed with God's mercy. Even if you think you know how to pray for another person, pray that God's mercy covers them. If you don't know how to pray for yourself, pray for God's mercy in your life. When you read the word mercy, think love.

Hope flows from the mercy of God.

Kathleen Norris on Acedia in the Time Of Covid

Kathleen Norris has a wonderful new essay in The Porch: "Acedia, Today." It's available to read at that link whether or not you are a subscriber. About ten or so years ago, Norris wrote a book on acedia, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. She then offered multiple definitions for the ancient word: absence or lack of care, sloth; spiritual torpor and apathy; listlessness, carelessness, melancholia. A reporter called her months into the Covid pandemic and asked for her thoughts about acedia now, and she told him that "acedia is as opportunistic as a virus." She admitted to being in a daze at the beginning of the pandemic's lockdown, but then she found her way by remembering what she'd learned about combating acedia, mostly from the hard-earned wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers for whom acedia was the "worst and most devastating temptation."

"They learned how to combat it and fortunately they passed that wisdom on: cling to your trust in God that acedia is determined to erode; cling to prayer, even though it is warfare to the last breath; go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything; pray the psalms, pray the psalms, pray the psalms."

To this, Norris added reading scripture in a leisurely thoughtful way; taking walks; reading good books; streaming good films; writing; talking to her neighbors (from a distance) and thanking the postal carriers, garbage collectors, and bus drivers; signing up for online seminar and talks; attending church online; praying for people including the people on her church's prayer chain; joining with others to ask and answer the important question of who can we help and how. Norris attributes the stop of acedia's "deadly spiral of self-absorption and despair" during the time of Covid to all these things, particularly choosing to care and choosing to love.

She included in her essay this beautiful prayer from the 13th century by Gertrude the Great. It's an appropriate prayer not just in the time of Covid but now also at the start of the season of Lent.

Be my honor, Lord,
My joy,
My beauty,
My consolation in sorrows,
My counsel in uncertainty,
My defense in everything unfair,
My patience in problems,
My abundance in poverty,
My food in fasting,
My sleep in vigilance,
And my healing in weakness.

~~~

[This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]

The Slow Work of God

Last week I was on a vacation/writing retreat. Sitting on a bookshelf where I stayed was the book, To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation by Laura Kelly Fanucci. This wonderful poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin jumped off a page for me, and I want to share it with you. It speaks to the challenge of finding our way in life, the challenge of being patient when things take ever so long, and the challenge of understanding the apparent slow timing of God.

Read it and see if it doesn’t resonate with something in your life, if it doesn’t give you some hope for being on the way.

“Patient Trust”

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.

And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(In: To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation, Laura Kelly Fanucci, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017. In: Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, edited by Michael Harter, 58. Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993.)

~

[Photo: taken of gray-headed coneflowers that I passed on a recent prairie walk]

Caim, a circling prayer

Here’s a prayer you might want to pray. It’s called the Caim prayer, or circling prayer. It speaks to the presence and love of God that surrounds us, that encircles us. I wrote about it on my blog once years ago at a time when so many needs were being prayed over. It seems a good time to offer it here again. These two variations are from the book Celtic Daily Prayer. You can insert your own words within the parentheses. Its title in this source is “Caim prayer (When I do not know what to pray).” You can pray it for yourself, and you can pray it for others.

1.

Circle (name), Lord.
Keep (comfort) near
and (discouragement) afar.
Keep (peace) within
and (turmoil) out.
Amen.

2.
Circle (name), Lord.
Keep protection near
and danger afar.

Circle (name), Lord.
Keep hope within,
keep despair without.

Circle (name), Lord.
Keep light near
and darkness afar.

Circle (name), Lord.
Keep peace within
and anxiety without.

The eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit
shield (name) on every side.
Amen.

The book suggests that you stretch your arm out and draw a circle clockwise around yourself as you pray to symbolize the encircling love of God.

~~~

[Photo: A dreary day that was the first day of Covid-19 stay-at-home mandate here in Minneapolis. Even so, we're only weeks ago from this scene at a nearby creek, currently oh-so-brown, bursting into its green and blue color palette; more to come. There's always more to come.]

Let our soul breathe hope

A reader of this blog/newsletter—a friend—recently recommended to me the book Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace by John Philip Newell (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). For each day of the week, morning and evening, the book includes a “prayer of awareness,” a “prayer for the life of the world,” and a “prayer of blessing,” as well as scripture and prompts for meditation. On this Monday morning, December 31, one of the prayers of the day seems so fitting for the New Year that I want to share it with you on this New Year’s Eve day.

For the freshness of this new day

thanks be to you, O God.

For morning’s gift of clarity

its light like the first day’s dawn

thanks be to you.

In this newborn light

let us see afresh.

In this gateway onto what has never been before

let our soul breathe hope

for the earth

for the creatures

for the human family.

Let our soul breathe hope.

Blessings to each of you in 2019!

~~~

[Photo: some wood ready for a New Year’s fire.]

On this election day – a prayer of the people

A friend posted this on Facebook over the weekend. With today being election day here in the U.S., I wanted to share it on this page.

From the Book of Common Prayer:

Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the
ways of justice and peace; that we may honor one another
and serve the common good.

Silence

Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.

~~~

[Photo: a cairn I came across this past weekend on a day away]