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Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
A Sick Person’s Complaint
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Edward Caswall.
A Sick Person’s Complaint
Hail holy Sacrament,
The worlds great VVonderment,
Mysterious Banquet, much more rare
Then Manna, or the Angels fare;
Each crum, though sinners on thee feed,
Doth Cleopatra’s Perl exceed.Oh how my Soul doth hunger, thirst and pine
After these Cates so precious, so divine!She need not bring her Stool
As some unbidden Fool;
The Master of this Heavenly Feast
Invites and wooes her for his Guest:
Though Deaf and Lame, Forlorn and Blind,
Yet welcome here she’s sure to find,
So that she bring a Vestment for the day,
And her old tatter’d Rags throw quite away.This is Bethsaida’s Pool
That can both cleanse and cool
Poor leprous and diseased souls,
An Angel here keeps and controls,
Descending gently from the Heavens above
To stir the waters; May He also move
My mind, and rocky heart so strike and rend,
That tears may thence gush out with them to blend.
Week Four: An Invitation to be ReconciledSource: “A Sick Person’s Complaint” from Hymns and Poems, Original and
Translated by Edward Caswall. London: Burns, Oates & Co., 1873.
Tomorrow’s Children
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Rubem Alves.
Tomorrow’s Children
What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.
It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection….
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness….
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love
is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.Source: “Tomorrow’s Children” from Hijos de Maoana, by Rubem Alves.
Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Sigueme, 1976.
The Prodigal Son
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Rudyard Kipling.
The Prodigal Son
Here come I to my own again,
Fed, forgiven and known again,
Claimed by bone of my bone again
And cheered by flesh of my flesh.
The fatted calf is dressed for me,
But the husks have greater zest for me,
I think my pigs will be best for me,
So I’m off to the Yards afresh.I never was very refined, you see,
(And it weighs on my brother’s mind, you see)
But there’s no reproach among swine, d’you see,
For being a bit of a swine.
So I’m off with wallet and staff to eat
The bread that is three parts chaff to wheat,
But glory be! – there’s a laugh to it,
Which isn’t the case when we dine.My father glooms and advises me,
My brother sulks and despises me,
And Mother catechises me
Till I want to go out and swear.
And, in spite of the butler’s gravity,
I know that the servants have it I
Am a monster of moral depravity,
And I’m damned if I think it’s fair!I wasted my substance, I know I did,
On riotous living, so I did,
But there’s nothing on record to show I did
Worse than my betters have done.
They talk of the money I spent out there –
They hint at the pace that I went out there –
But they all forget I was sent out there
Alone as a rich man’s son.So I was a mark for plunder at once,
And lost my cash (can you wonder?) at once,
But I didn’t give up and knock under at once,
I worked in the Yards, for a spell,
Where I spent my nights and my days with hogs.
And shared their milk and maize with hogs,
Till, I guess, I have learned what pays with hogs
And – I have that knowledge to sell!So back I go to my job again,
Not so easy to rob again,
Or quite so ready to sob again
On any neck that’s around.
I’m leaving, Pater. Good-bye to you!
God bless you, Mater! I’ll write to you!
I wouldn’t be impolite to you,
But, Brother, you are a hound!Source: “The Prodigal Son” from Rudyard Kipling Complete Verse, by Rudyard
Kipling. New York: Anchor, 1998.
What to Remember When Waking
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by David Whyte.
What to Remember When Waking
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?Source: “What to Remember When Waking” from The House of Belonging by
David Whyte. Langley,WA: Many Rivers Press, 2004.
Weekly Photo Challenge – My Neighborhood
I am so blest to live in San Rafael. It’s a beautiful neighborhood.
I think of the words of the song from Mr. Rogers:
It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, A beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Prayer
Thomas a Kempis wrote the classic, The Imitation of Christ. Today our Lenten poem/prayer from Education for Justice is from that book.
Prayer
Grant me, O Lord, to know what I ought to know,
To love what I ought to love,
To praise what delights thee most,
To value what is precious in thy sight,
To hate what is offensive to thee.
Do not suffer me to judge according to the sight of my eyes,
Nor to pass sentence according to the hearing
of the ears of ignorant men;
But to discern with a true judgment between things visible and spiritual,
And above all, always to inquire what is the good pleasure of thy will.Source: “Prayer” from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. New
York: Random House, 1998.
Self Portrait
Education for Justice is by David Whyte.
Self Portrait
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong
or feel abandoned.
If you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequences
of love and the bitter,
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard in that fierce embrace,
even the gods speak of God.Source: “Self Portrait” from Fire in the Earth by David Whyte. Washington:
Many Rivers Press, 1992.
Christ Has No Body
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). I am familiar with the poem and have always thought of it as the Prayer of St. Teresa.
Christ Has No Body
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
The Heart of Compassion
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Joyce Rupp.
The Heart of Compassion
Compassionate God,
your generous presence
is always attuned to hurting ones.
Your listening ear is bent
toward the cries of the wounded
Your heart of love
fills with tears for the suffering.Turn my inward eye to see
that I am not alone.
I am a part of all of life.
Each one’s joy and sorrow
is my joy and sorrow,
and mine is theirs.
May I draw strength
from this inner communion.
May it daily recommit me
to be a compassionate presence
for all who struggle with life’s pain.Source: “The Heart of Compassion” from Your Sorrow is My Sorrow, by Joyce
Rupp. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Co., 1999.
The Peace of Wild Things
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Wendell Berry.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.Source: “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
by Wendell Berry. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998.
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