Prayers
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The Map Of Scars
I dreamed of my daddy last night, which was unusual. I rarely dream of him, probably because I didn’t really know him at all, having only seen him less than forty times in my life. In the dream, I couldn’t see Daddy’s face clearly. This has been a lifelong pattern for me. So often, I will look someone full in the face in one of my dreams but the face will be blurred or occluded in some way. I can see the person from the periphery of my vision, but a direct gaze will immediately blur the center of my dream-vision. It is like mercury, forever running and shifting away…
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Chosen: Custody of the Eyes
We recently watched an interesting short documentary, Chosen: Custody of the Eyes. The film traces the discernment and pursuit of a young nun’s vocation as a member of a cloistered community of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. Most striking about the young woman was the sense of deep, quiet joy at the privilege of withdrawing from the world and devoting herself to contemplation and prayer for that same world. Watch any “coming of age” or “trial by fire” documentary these days and you will notice how the film’s subjects will stress the difficulty and challenges of their undertakings, how disconcerting the new environment, and how traumatic the privations or…
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Prie-Deux
Here, now, just like this. This is that flash of a moment when I feel Your presence, Your friendship. Just now, sitting here in the dark room, the candle-flame a small, still pillar before me, the coffee-pot murmuring in the kitchen, my skin cool and alive and grateful in the yet-night air, my knees aching from kneeling here at my improvised prie-deux, my submerged brain still kicking towards the lake’s surface. Just now, like this, Your affection and attention are as close and real as a garment. And I seem to almost be able to touch understanding in these moments. If I were thrown here in some act of divine…
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Before My Candle
I sit before my candle and watch it the flame. How can a thing so still be so alive? The flame is mysterious to me. I’m told that energy is never destroyed, that it merely changes form. What form does the blue-and-yellow flower of fire morph into as it reaches to the ceiling, immobile as long as my breath does not reach it? Does it cycle back to be used by some other soul, some child of God asking questions that all seem rhetorical? The candle illuminates my face, and I wonder how I appear to it. I suspect that animals can see and hear and sense things that are…
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In A Trying Time
A hot, bleak, disappointing day, and sitting here in the quiet of a cool room, I am grateful that it is at an end. Two sizable disappointments bled the day of much of its appeal. One was a considerable setback at my job, which does not bode well for me in the coming weeks. The other was a bit of dismal financial news, arriving when I reached home this evening. And yet I do not feel crushed or despondent, and my spirits are cheery and calm. I believe the credit for my calmness in the face of disappointment goes to two mp3’s to which I listened today. This morning on…
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Sanctae Scripturae
In the arid palm of August, this region is not as hot as Texas but it is hot enough to drive me inside for most of the day. I bookend the hours on days like this with a walk and a long sitting/meditating/praying/reading session before the sun gets too high in the sky and then again after it drops behind the western ridge. The stretch in between is taken up with whatever piddling and puttering can be accomplished inside, in the cool dark cathedral of home. This morning, I sat out in the piney shade of the front yard, breviary on my knees, and with the stiff breeze it was…
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Little Griefs
The second foggy morning in August so far, and I am tracking them. Mountain lore holds that the number of fogs in August forecasts the number of snows in the coming winter. Last year it was off a bit, but it’s still great fun to monitor. Through the fog’s gloom as I drove, I saw a tiny fawn in the road, lying exactly along the yellow stripe in the center. Such a delicate and beautiful little creature, fragile and soft and spotted. It looked to be sleeping as I slowed and passed it. And I had the same thought I always have when I see such sights. I thought of…
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Layksuh Hayull
I sat outside this morning with bible, breviary, and notebook, my coffee steaming in the cool and sugared mugginess of the day’s initial pages. Up in the woods in the direction of the new-born sun, a screech owl called, sounding as always like a tiny spectral horse whinnying. His appearance is early this year; I usually don’t hear the screech owls until mid-to-late September. And I sat and sipped and wondered if his eerie song was considered a harbinger in the mythos of any peoples. The squadron of the buzzing bullets we call hummingbirds were about their business, and watching them reminded me of something from my pilgrimage to Gethsemani…
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Passing, Briefly
For the past couple of years, I have daily passed a man on a bicycle on the way to work. I always see him in town, about a mile from where I turn off the main road and head to my office. On the right shoulder of the road, he wears a jacket and ball cap, and a small backpack is strapped across his shoulders. I have never clearly seen his face, though when I glance over at him or look in my rear-view mirror, I can tell that he is wearing glasses. I cannot tell whether they are for vision or for protection against bugs and other things that…
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Rememberance
If I had a large brood of children, and if I sat down to write them a letter by which they might remember me, and if in this letter I offered some general guidelines on how to live a virtuous life and honor my memory… And if, on the other side of this life, I learned that my children were constantly divided against each other because of their individual insistence that each of them had the correct, full, and perfect understanding of my letter, and if I saw them spending long hours analyzing and parsing every syllable of my letter instead of getting on with the business of being my…