Thursday, June 20, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Praying through our days this summer in Illinois
This is how you are to pray: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.
The evening approaches dusk at the end of the hottest day so far. 2024 is not exempt from the climate crisis, or whatever you’d like to call these more and more insistent heat waves.
We haven’t turned off our air conditioner, or invited the heat in to abide with us. We watched a movie called Alias Nick Beal, about a human servant of Satan played in nasty confidence by Ray Milland, starring in his most diabolical role. Mr. Beal won’t touch a Bible, resisting good as he conspires to corrupt the men and women around him, looking for the “seed of destruction” in each one of them. Made in 1949, the year Margaret and I were born, it haunts us in 2024, but it did all turn out ok in the end.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
We have been visiting and lunching with friends, and we are planning a trip to see Margaret’s family in Evansville this weekend. Although it might take five hours to get from Austin to Texas’ border with Arkansas, we can make it through Illinois to Indiana in less than an hour. It will be hot there too. We’re in the middle of a heat dome, and it’s not going anywhere.
My friend’s parents came to visit from Texas last week, wondering if they might stay for a couple of months to get away from the Texas heat. But they only stayed a week. It was hotter here than at their home near Dallas.
Give us this day our daily bread.
I had lunch with my buddy John a couple of days ago at a farmers’ restaurant outside Urbana called the Apple Dumpling. Our server brought me a big plate of chicken and noodles on top of mashed potatoes, topped with lots of gravy. I did not check my blood sugar that afternoon. I don’t think the word “moderation” could be used in any sentence that described my lunch.
It does seem that each day I find another exception to the dietary rules diabetics need to follow. I think I’m on vacation, but this “vacation” will last nearly two months. At home Margaret has been sharing her gluten free meat loaf and General Tso’s chicken. I am thankful for the meals she makes for us.
At home I eat lots of apples and a few bananas. Fewer grapes and more apples. Keep the doctor away. It was the doctor who told me to eat all these apples. Keeps my mouth chewing and my hands away from the crackers and the chocolate. That kind of works.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
We hope to visit Saint Meinrad Monastery on the way to Evansville. The Benedictine monks at Saint Meinrad work on their farm, harvest their garden produce to share at meals with each other, and they sing. They chant. The music during their prayer services each day carries me away.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory …
Margaret and I made a two-night retreat at Saint Meinrad a few years ago. I spent three spiritual direction sessions with Father Coleman, who came to Saint Meinrad to finish his education while still a teenager. Father Coleman never left. He became a church musician, a professor, and a proficient gardener and farmer. Margaret took a picture of us standing beside the gardening truck he was driving that morning, no longer dressed in his monk’s habit.
Forever and ever, Amen.
After one morning’s mass I stayed in the Archabbey Church for another hour or so with my eyes closed, listening to whispered conversations and other sounds less identifiable. This meditative hour is what I remember best from that retreat – the rich peaceful lush soundscape around me, made more dear, even precious, by the closing of my eyes.
Yes, Jesus told his friends, this is how you are to pray.
(Sirach 48, Psalm 97, Romans 8, Matthew 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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