Just when I thought that I had made a mistake coming here – rainy and dreary since I arrived, the one thing I brought to read is not doing the trick, no great desire to pray or be quiet (or to stay away from email), bored, even agitated – just when I thought I should pack up and go home … there is sun!
If you are ever lost in Loogootee, Indiana, find in this restaurant a fine buffet of Amish recipes. In the gift shop I also found Uncle Osgood’s popcorn on the cob. If that were not enough, I think I might have found how I can keep busy and do good, when I am no longer in full time administration of a parish. Across the lake from the restaurant is a St. Mary’s Catholic Church. I wondered how a priest out in nowhere can ever get away on vacation or retreat. Where does he find priest help to watch over the parish while he is gone? I could help with that!
November 21, 2013
I started my retreat this morning looking out the window of a hotel in Indianapolis, as I prayed the day’s first parts of the Liturgy of the Hours (the Divine Office, the breviary): Morning Prayer and Office of Readings. I had slept in Indianapolis, because St. Meinrad Abbey did not have a room for me last night. Between the [brackets] are inklings, nudges and curiosities that stirred in me as I prayed or read:
Forty years I endured that generation.
I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray
and they do not know my ways.”
So I swore in my anger,
“They shall not enter into my rest.”
[Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, forty years ago. I wonder if this is why our country is restless: “rest” less.]
You saved me from my furious foes.
You set me above my assailants.
[Our foes, assailants, enemies are not always the human kind. They are also those repeater sins, those aggravating weaknesses and habitual faults, those continuing temptations that will not leave us alone until they have done everything they can do to defeat us or make us feel defeated.]
Even their own shepherds do not feel for them.
[I recently heard a priest, much younger than I, bemoan that the Archdiocese, asking priests to pastor 2, 3 and four parishes, has absolutely no concern for the health of priests. I must pray for him, and for my bishops.]
I took two staffs, one of which I called “Favor,” and the other, “Bonds.”
[God is always favoring us – gracing us, gifting us – and always bonding with us. We are to pray, not to get a favor from God, but to deepen our relationship with God.]
Indeed the blessed Mary certainly did the Father’s will, and so it was for her a greater thing to have been Christ’s disciple than to have been his mother, and she was more blessed in her discipleship than in her motherhood. Hers was the happiness of first bearing in her womb him whom she would obey as her master. Mary heard God’s word and kept it, and so she is blessed. She kept God’s truth in her mind, a nobler thing than carrying his body in her womb.
[This is fascinating and haunting, but I can’t figure it out, and don’t know what to do with it – yet.]
Mary is the Chalice, Christ the Saving Blood!
[We also refer to her as the Ark of the Covenant. Are we chalice and ark, too?]
I will lavish choice portions upon the priests,
and my people shall be filled with my blessings, says the Lord.
[The Lord has certainly done so for me.]
With Open Doors 