The color green

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 18, 2022

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

The color green

I would have been driving through the Ozarks this morning, listening to church services in Lincoln and Austin, but Marc needs some extra help for another couple of days. So I will miss the incredible beauty of the forested hills covering Missouri and Arkansas. I will see them in October, however, I hope.

Meanwhile the leaves on our front yard maple tree are covered with black spots. Turns out they aren’t the external evidence of an internal disaster, only “tar spots,” which won’t kill our tree no matter how ugly they get.

Come to think of it, as I’m getting older I find a few “tar spots” on me as well.

The person who is trustworthy in small matters is also trustworthy in great ones. No servant can serve two masters

Wandering through my email I find a beautiful article about Rich Mullins. We saw Rich at a concert at Lincoln Christian College, decades before the campus was sold and its beautiful chapel became the meeting place for Open Arms, a local church.

Rich Mullins was pulled all his life between various church denominations, but he fell for liturgy in a big way – even named one of his albums A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. After a Catholic mass he wrote once:

Wow, I just took Communion, and if Augustine were alive today, he would have had it with me. And maybe he was. And maybe he did.

Those words make me think I love that man. He died young, on a rainy night twenty-five years ago tomorrow not far from Peoria, Illinois, when the Jeep he was driving swerved and he was thrown in front of a big truck.

Rich never married:

Catholicism also suggested a vocational structure for his singleness. A lifelong admirer of Saint Francis of Assisi, he was strongly attracted to the Franciscan monastic tradition, even though he joked that he was “too wimpy” to actually join the Brotherhood. He would launch his own “micro-monastic” experiment in his last years on a Navajo reservation, with a small band of earnest college students who called themselves the “Kid Brothers of Saint Frank.”

The article is bringing tears to my eyes. In order to be a better teacher on the reservation, he went back to school for a degree in music ed.

While there, he lived with a professor who had a profoundly disabled baby daughter. She couldn’t hear, but he liked to whisper his prayers in her ears. She didn’t know how to pray, but then, he would say, neither did he. He left that in the hands of the God who “in his mercy, does not answer our prayers according to our understanding, but according to his wisdom.” He wrote her a lullaby, “Madeline’s Song,” that was performed live but never put on a record. She went to meet her Maker shortly after he did.

 

 

 

This morning I might have been driving in Missouri, among the maples and the oaks. So many beautiful songs. I might have taken communion in the car, with Augustine maybe, and with Rich. He told stories back when he was singing that still echo in my ear. He sang, “When I leave, I’m gonna go out like Elijah.” And there’s … “If I Stand:”

There’s a loyalty that’s deeper

Than mere sentiment

A music higher than the songs

That I can sing

The stuff of earth competes

For the allegiance

I owe only to the giver

Of all good things

So if I stand let me stand on the promise

That You will pull me through

And if I can’t let me fall on the grace

That first brought me to You …

 I guess that’s what he did.

(Amos 8, Psalm 113, 1 Timothy 2, 2 Corinthians 8, Luke 16)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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