Thick fog hovers Agnus Dei and Lake Immaculata.
Clearing moment by moment, evaporating like thoughts.
Bullfrogs moan in night darkness; dawn silences as birds awaken.
I ponder relationships and pride that hovers thick.
1. The younger woman whose sense of entitlement snagged the towel from the elderly woman drying chalices in the Sacristy despite the elder's entitlement to her just work.
2. The obese young father wearing tee shirt with obscenities, his little boy and girl watching him as slaves eyes' ever-cautious upon the hand of the master; they leave after receiving Christ, here and gone.
At least these people put in their presence from self-importance or from minimalist duty. They come before the altar of God, whether they realize it or not. We sinners come. Many do not.
I consider the young British couple whose lovely daughter is abducted. Horrors of evil. Then I wonder if they realize their other babies--conceived by invitro fertilization and abducted, disposed or frozen? This fact does not hinder prayers for their four-year-old, lost. But I wonder if they miss their other babies? Do they look for them? Does the whole world pray for these lost babies?
The book on Hildegard of Bingen, written by a current author, proves my rule that I must read only books by the dead proven and true. This woman opines in anger against that which she is not: Catholic. The book depresses; I am sickened by the jibes, the insinuations and affronts that saintly women who chose God alone and above all else were forced to this as a result of the Church's ill-treatment of them.
I wonder about my relationships with others, and the sense of isolation. At times it seems I peer out at the world, at others, at their very souls, from within an encasement: a shell thin but strong, with two orb-holes from which to peer and a soul centered heart from which to sense.
And, why am I embracing this life of silence, solitude, slowness--a veritable mauseleum of its own, my life at odds with much of the lives about me? Is it my choosing? Is it God's taking that life from me through circumstances, or is it He giving it to me through grace?
Perhaps the very absence of relationships and the presence of the peering into lives, pricking at pride and sensing the sorrows of the world, the lost--the damned--is what gives me a living death but eternal work in prayer for souls.
I pray for the author of the current book on Hildegard. I pray to Hildegard for help in this existence, and wait for what might be today and next. Maybe the guts will be strong to finish the book, to anguish some for the author's bias against Holy Mother Church and that which Hildegard gloriously loved and lived in her own living death.
For now the fog has cleared. I prepare for Mass and brace for souls, the poor in spirit, the proud, and bring my sinful self before the altar of God Almighty.
