Friday in Lent 2 - 2017

This is one of several prayers that I wrote for a personal Book of Hours back when my Macintosh computer was primitive and everything was printed on a dot-matrix printer.  I find that the prayers hold up well for my own piety.  I plan to share some of them over the next few days.  This one seems apt for a Friday.

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For those who suffer and die alone

Merciful Father, whose all-seeing glance and loving concern embrace even the sparrows and yet whose well-beloved Son had nowhere to lay his head and was forsaken by all his friends: Hear our prayer for those whose suffering and death are unnoticed by human eyes or ears and unministered to by mortal voice or touch; in your compassion grant them strength, consolation, and the ineffable grace of your loving presence; deliver them from despair and suffer not your Image to fade in their anguish; may your holy angels guard them from the evil one and lead them at last into that holy city where there is neither sorrow nor crying, but the fullness of you with all the saints; through Jesus Christ our Savior.  Amen.

--the BB

Thursday in Lent 2 - 2017

An altered look about the hills
A Tyrian light the village fills
A wider sunrise in the morn
A deeper twilight on the lawn
A print of a vermilion foot
A purple finger on the slope
A flippant fly upon the pane
A spider at his trade again
An added strut in Chanticleer
A flower expected everywhere
An axe shrill singing in the woods
Fern odors on untraveled roads
All this and more I cannot tell
A furtive look you know as well
And Nicodemus' Mystery
Receives its annual reply!

--Miss Dickinson

Commentary seems superfluous.
--the BB

Wednesday in Lent 2 - 2017

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?"
Matthew 6.25 

At some times and for some things I can wait patiently.  Most of the time I want what i want when I want it, and I usually want it right now. Nonetheless, wanting and fretting, pouting or griping--these do nothing to hasten the ripening of anything.

Whitman reminds us truth is always there.  It will come in its time.

Jesus has some things to say about fretting.

Deep breath.  Hold.  Exhale. Repeat.

--the BB

Sunday in Lent 2 -2017

Today's posting is very tardy. Простите!

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh, er ihn macht

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours,
       trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I rather like the idea of embodying God by going to the limits of our being.

--the BB