Crazy Stable

Crazy Stable: Crazed Catholic Lenten Prayer Edition completes its first full week! I've posted a kickin' old-school prayer (almost) daily since Ash Wednesday and am just warming up. If I pull this off, blogging may join fasting, prayer and almsgiving as a Lenten discipline, and you will know whom to thank.

Technically, I believe, Sundays are not part of Lent. But since I missed posting yesterday, I'll share today the only prayer I remember to say with any regularity: one for children from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, given to me by my dear friend Merian after my daughter's birth. She referred to herself as an Anglican, so including this prayer in a Catholic context reminds me of the bar owner in The Blues Brothers who assured Jake and Elwood, "Oh, we play both kinds of music: country and western!" 

I pray it when my daughter sails out of the house each morning, but now I'll include this sweetheart: Melven, the little guy we just sponsored through the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging. This is a fantastic organization, for which our former pastor now works; they spend their money wisely in the developing world, and the kids and elderly folks sponsored really do exist. Melven is 6, likes "maths" and dancing, and has a little sister and a dad whose income as a security guard "is not enough to maintain basic expenses." Curiously, his dossier also states that Melven is "willing to become a doctor." Since I live in Brooklyn and he in India (two places where nothing is impossible), someday I could look up from a gurney in my blithering old age and see those gorgeous eyes looking down at me from over a surgical mask. There are lots more kids (and dear, needy old folks) waiting; go here if you can spare $30 a month to sponsor one of them!

Here is that beautiful prayer for our children, spiritual and otherwise; for girls, please swap in "her" for "him" so I needn't burden the syntax.

A Prayer for A Child

Watch over thy child, O Lord, as his days increase. Bless and guide him wherever he may be. Strengthen him when he stands; comfort him when discouraged or sorrowful; raise him up if he fall; and in his heart may Thy peace, which passeth understanding, abide all the days of his life, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.