Sinfully Wrong

There is something gravely and sinfully wrong with a world where the division between the rich and the poor continues to expand, where some still live in palaces and recline on ivory couches while others starve outside their gates. In our day, the prophets still speak for a world where the hungry are fed, the ill are healed, where all children are educated and no one is denied the basic necessities of life.

+Katharine,
Presiding Bishop and Primate
of The Episcopal Church

A Secret Life

this town likes its secrets, so many masks worn to hid the pain, doors slammed shut to prevent the eye from seeing the truth, people separated, walled off from one another, unwilling to acknowledge the abyss within and around them, they push others away with a smile or a frown, shunning god, they hold to their fragile self respect in order not to become undone by their unveiled selves.

what is a little weird is that their masks are cracked, you can see their faces in their absence, in their silence, in their fear, and yet they will not come too close, hold back, desiring to remain under the fig leaf, waiting ....

A Poem: ICU

motionless
she laid
in her bed
staring into
the emptiness
of the room

hopeful and scared
following triple bypass
surgery and beginning
dialysis

pictures of family
on table
to her right

she smiled when
i acknowledged her
teddy bear

together we prayed.

Let us remember

The conscious of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost the ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had kindled. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.

Abraham J. Heschel
Man's Quest for God

The Feast of Saint Mark the Apostle

Almighty God, by the hand of Mark the evangelist you have given to your Church the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God: We thank you for this witness, and pray that we may be firmly grounded in its truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter 67

On Brethren Who Are Sent on a Journey

Let the brethren who are sent on a journey
commend themselves
to the prayers of all the brethren and of the Abbot;
and always at the last prayer of the Work of God
let a commemoration be made of all absent brethren.

When brethren return from a journey,
at the end of each canonical Hour of the Work of God
on the day they return,
let them lie prostrate on the floor of the oratory
and beg the prayers of all
on account of any faults
that may have surprised them on the road,
through the seeing or hearing of something evil,
or through idle talk.
And let no one presume to tell another
whatever he may have seen or heard outside of the monastery,
because this causes very great harm.
But if anyone presumes to do so,
let him undergo the punishment of the Rule.
And let him be punished likewise who would presume
to leave the enclosure of the monastery
and go anywhere or do anything, however small,
without an order from the Abbot.