Wednesday, June 26, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Peace at the last
Your servants have smelted down the metals available in the temple and have consigned them to the master workmen in the temple of the Lord.
Each Monday evening and Thursday noon a group gathers in Urbana on either Zoom or in person for an hour of centering prayer and discussion. Our hour includes prayers from the heart, prayers which we “pray to the Lord” and the others of us respond, “Lord, hear our prayer.” This common prayer is nearly universal among the Catholic, Anglican and Episcopal churches around the world. It offers everyone opportunity to give voice and call out to God, in the presence of others also praying, those things which matter much in my own heart.
Just a night before, here’s the prayer I heard, surprised by it, prayed over orphan children in their nighttime dormitory beds by the nurse who cared for whoever came to her doctor’s hospital pregnant. Many of the babies were both born and reared there at this unconventional hospital on the New England hill. Written by John Henry Cardinal Newman, and bound into the rhythms of John Irving’s masterpiece The Cider-House Rules, you can find it on page 883 of the Book of Common Prayer.
O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in your mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.
 It was the nurse who prayed those words over the girl children. The doctor’s words over his boys in their own ward, more and more tender even as he became more thick-skinned at the same time, made for them a simple benediction: “Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”
The king made a covenant before the Lord that they would follow him. That they would observe his ordinances and statutes with their whole hearts and souls. And all the people stood as participants in the covenant.
Oh, there is such great power in words! We bless and curse, we give thanks, offer forgiveness, spew bitterness and rage, all with words. Sticks and stones, sure, but words … words we can’t forget – words of blessing and the other words, they serve to shape us as we sleep, awaken, and continue each next day as if it were our own.
Tonight we’re seeing Twelfth Night at Ewing Theater in Bloomington, produced by the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and no doubt we’ll be regularly overwhelmed and enchanted by Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom – by his words. We might not remember them for long afterward, but in the moments of our hearing we’ll be broken and bound back together by his words. I can’t wait to enter the play as an observer, then be caught up into the action, breathless. The words will take me there.
In the opening scene of Spielberg’s Lincoln, two white and two black soldiers remember the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. One of the white boys was at Gettysburg for the speech, but could hear little. Still, by now all of them knew the words by heart, having read them here and there, sharing them with each other in darkened tents, holding their collective breath, awaiting dawn bugle calls to battle. The scene is spellbinding, a moment of empowering pride for the speakers and their listeners, before the story’s devolution into political chaos. Not so much different for us, hearing the daily news but always also knowing the better angels in ourselves through God’s words, through God’s words, God’s words.
Remain in me as I remain in you, saith the Lord. For whoever remains in me will bear much fruit.
(2 Kings 22, Psalm 119, John 15, Matthew 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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