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| The Angelus |
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"Prayer and the computer age may strike us as incompatible. However, I see their intersections, don't you? Prayer, both individual and communal, is to me like a resting place of praise and thanksgiving amid information saturation. I see us choosing to respond to and live in the world in either belief or disbelief. We can stand at the crossroads and decide. The question is to pray or not to pray."
Thoughts adapted from Psalms for All Seasons
A boy concentrated on features of a mobile phone while the grownups talked before Thanksgiving.
His uncle watched a while, then finally asked the boy:
"What if you spent as much time getting to know the Bible as you do that phone?"
This was said gently, and we could ask a similar question about our digital distractions. When we think, we know that no Age, however advanced it may seem, can outdo or drive out prayer. Age to
Age, God remains high and lofty and yet as near as our breathing. He is the same, and prayer takes us near Him.
Source of the opening quote is the book Psalms for All Seasons by John E.Craghan, 1993, The Liturgical Press, pp. 1,2
Your choice of the Angelus by Jean Millet recalled a vivid experience I once had. From 1967-69 I was a Social Worker with the Kentucky
ReplyDeleteDivision of Public Assistance. One of my poor clients, a disabled woman, had a painting of the Angelus hanging on a wall of her home. This work had beend duly reproted in the case records along with the story which she repeated to me, that a son of the artist had come to America to live, and ancestral relative of the client had done a favor for the young man. In appreciation, the young man gave the ancestor the painting saying that it was the original and that the one hanging in the L'Ourve was a reproduction. Her painting was wider than the original, all the potatoes of the harvest were in the basket. The one in the L'Ourve shows some of the potatoes still lying ion the ground. Think of the possibility. In the home of woman on Welfare hung one of the Masterpieces of the World, a lost Masterpiece. I have used the illustration for the Lost Masterpiece of the Gospel, the soul, and etc. Right now we need a recovery of the theology and the prayer life that produced the First and Second Great Awakenings which transformed the Protestant Faith and launched the Great Century of Missions.