Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Memorial of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Glory be
Cold air has descended upon the earlier arrival of spring. We can no longer sit outside in the sun to hear birds sing in the morning and the too soon onset of crickets at night, not without heavy coats and hats to protect our heads from the return of winter.
Take care and be earnestly on your guard not to forget the things which your own eyes have seen, nor let them slip from memory as long as you live.
These last few days have been host to an onrush of memories, just as if, while on the River Trail, I’d slipped into a cascade of rapids I knew were there but had no idea what they would do to my tiny canoe. More than once I heard Isaiah’s words fill my own mouth and escape through my lips.
Woe is me. I am undone.
The Fighting Illini beat Wisconsin at home, then lost to Purdue in Champaign. Watching that second stunning game last night I admired every player on each team, watching them play basketball with brilliant abandon, accepting each moment as it came and then forgetting it, going on to the next. Later, watching the first half of Joaquin Phoenix’ Napoleon, I thought something similar about the quiet, fearless military genius embarrassing his barely adequate opponents, but only for half his life, after which he would be the one embarrassed.
The Lord has strengthened the bars of your gates; he has blessed your children within you.
And in a fourth instance of the seductive limits of power, an impasse in our son’s life that nearly broke him has been itself broken. Because of this crisis in his life he will never be the same. But now the pressures he has endured for years are suddenly released. He can breathe. In this freedom some kind of collapse is imminent, and even necessary. But the Lord’s solid rock beneath him holds, whether he is standing or sitting or fallen on his face. Gratitude pours out of all his pores, to mix and merge with the love of God.
I spent hours mostly alone on the Valparaiso University campus yesterday, remembering, fnding the places where I lived or my friends lived, remembering those relationships, knowing how those pressures too needed to be released, week after week, year after year, fifty years ago but just the same today.
In the cold air I walked the lovely labyrinth east of the chapel. In the small chapel below the altar I played a tune in B flat without a name on the baby grand piano. I sat alone in the middle of the vast, echoing Chapel of the Resurrection and proclaimed the doxology over and over.
Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
I knew those words carry the never-ending love of God, more solid and lasting than I can imagine, lifting me and all of us out of one life and into another.
Your words, Lord, are Spirit and truth; you have the words of everlasting life.
(Deuteronomy 4, Psalm 147, John 6, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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