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.

"Ten Lepers" by James Christensen

To know me, is to know how much I love the gospel story of the 10 lepers healed by Christ (Luke 17:11-19). I love it so much I named my graphic arts enterprise "Tenth Leper Press." And now I have discovered this enchanting painting by Mormon fantasy artist James Christensen. I am reproducing it without permission, so maybe if I link to his gallery where you can buy a copy, they will forgive me.

The story obsesses me for many reasons. One is the rough mathematical accuracy (in my experience) of "one out of 10 lepers says thank you." The story acknowledges the pain of all unthanked healers and givers ("Were not all ten cleansed?" Christ asks, a question that always pricks my heart.) It also reflects how often we cut and run after fate seems to deal us a break; sometimes, you just don't want to be reminded of your old self, or how bad things might've been. The Tenth Leper, who comes back and "falls on his face," does more than thank; as Mark Lane, C.O. of the Oratory of St. Boniface has pointed out, this guy must now grapple with a new identity as a healthy person, and (as happened in Monty Python's Life of Brian), he may now be out of a perfectly good job begging piteously. Healing can be scary; it brings a whole bunch of new expectations.

But gratitude is something we can get right even when we're too dysfunctional to accomplish much else. If you are blessed with a human healer in your life, let them know. (For an awesome tale in that vein, see below.) Here is a prayer that channels the Tenth Leper. I honestly don't know where it came from. 

The Prayer of the Tenth Leper 

Jesus, Master, have pity on me.

Touch me in my isolation.

Heal me of my afflictions.

Free me to serve you with a glad heart,

And draw me back always to thank you

For your infinite mercy and love. Amen.

The Grateful Patient: An Uncanny Tale

'Ten Lepers Healed' by Brian Kershisnik (another Mormon, interestingly)In a previous post, I posited only half-kiddingly that my dad, a Catholic convert with a  bottomless heart, was a bona fide saint. Here is, perhaps, a bit of evidence for his "cause" (as Catholics call the project of getting a saint canonized): When my dad died of leukemia in 1985, the hematologist/oncologist who had cared for him, and all of us, with great compassion was unfortunately traveling in his native Italy on medical business. We stumbled out of the hospital in a fog of grief, and I never got a chance to thank that physician for all his care. I meant to call, really. Years passed. Twenty years, actually, and then some. One day, on a guilty whim, I googled the doctor, who was still in practice, and e-mailed him a note of thanks.

The doc promptly replied, saying he was touched (if, I suspect, a bit puzzled) to have gotten such a note so long after losing his patient. He admitted that he did not recall my father individually after all these years, but vividly recalled the week following his death; when he was to have flown back to New York, he changed his flight on an inexplicable, strangely persistent hunch. Doing so, he recounted, may have saved his life, since a terrorist attack tore through the terminal from which he would have departed, killing 16. I learned two things from this interchange: (1) Yeah, Daddy's first miracle, and try convincing me otherwise. (2) Cool things can happen when you swallow your pride and say thank you, even when it's ludicrously overdue.

Most nights, I don't so much fall asleep as pass out. But if I had a few moments of consciousness I'd like to follow the advice of Russian Orthodox saint, Theophan the Recluse*: "It is the essence of evening prayer to thank God for the day and everything that happened, both pleasant and unpleasant; to ask forgiveness for all wrongs committed, promising to improve during the next day; and to pray that God preserve you during sleep. Express all this to God from your mind and from your whole heart." Here is an Eastern Orthodox night prayer that does the job:

O Lord our God, however I have sinned this day in word, deed or thought, forgive me, for Thou art gracious and lovest mankind.

Grant me peaceful and undisturbed sleep. Send me Thy guardian angel to shield me and protect me from every evil;

for Thou art the Guardian of our souls and bodies, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

* St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894) was a holy monk and bishop and a prolific spiritual writer. This is a picture of him...

...but I confess I am reminded of Mel Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and Dom Deluise's rascally Father Fyodor in that under-appreciated gem.

For today's Lenten prayer, I have scanned a yellowed and dog-eared card found in my dad's old Catholic missal (the prayer book with the Latin and English words of the Mass). I love the "Our Father," but this one is the "My Father." As in, my father lived this prayer. He also embodied its earnest, fervent midcentury style, being a Catholic convert from the era of Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living broadcasts. The prayer is called "Learning Christ":

My dad's life was indeed "strong in its purpose of sanctity." He lived his faith in every encounter, as a father, neighbor, insurance salesman, passing motorist...but perhaps most of all as husband. The man who saved this prayer card was married (after a 15-year courtship) to a beautiful but troubled woman who lived her life in the grip of fear, insecurity, anger and cynicism. I believe I am the offspring of the world's greatest optimist and its darkest pessimist. And in all the years of their marriage, my father never gave up his patient campaign to ease my mother's embattled heart. Turn the card over, and his inscription (Q for Quentin, M for Mathilde) reveals that he gave it to her four years before they finally married, while he was still a military policeman guarding FDR during World War II.

My dad and me"Learning Christ" might sound a bit sanctimonious or impossibly pious to our post-modern ears. After all, therapy and self-fulfillment are our touchstones now, not "putting ourselves aside." But you will have to take my word for it that the man who lived this prayer was the happiest man I've ever known, and the freest. He lived each day in joy and died at peace, beloved by all who knew him. Through him, I "learned Christ" a little more every day. Corny as it sounds, I am quite convinced he is a saint. If you're in the market for an intercessor, Richard Quentin Becker would, I'm sure, be happy to hear from you.

"I don't do mornings," as the saying goes, so it is fitting that I would get around to posting a "Daily Offering," or morning prayer, at nearly noon. The tradition of starting one's day by consecrating it to God is very old. This prayer was a familiar one a few generations ago, and so was devotion to the "immaculate heart" of Mary. (More on that below.) I love how this prayer pulls you out of your sluggish, queasy, self-absorbed misery (okay, speaking for myself here), and thrusts you into robust fellowship with every Catholic in the world, the guys in Rome, the souls in God-knows-where...suddenly, it's about more than just stumbling out of the house on time.

Daily Offering to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and suffering of this day in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world. I offer them for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart: the salvation of souls, reparation for sins, the reunion of all Christians; I offer them for the intentions of our Bishops and of all Apostles of Prayer and in particular for those recommended by our Holy Father this month.  Amen.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary flourished relatively late in the Church's history, fueled by various mystics who reported seeing visions of alarming cardiological revelation. Often their two hearts are revered together, Christ's heart surrounded with a crown of thorns and Mary's pierced by seven swords. And we Catholics wonder why we scare people? I grew up around this sort of holy card imagery, with its cheerful mix of gruesome symbolism and dainty insipidity. (The only thing that ever bothered me was the anatomical incorrectness--why a valentine pinned to the middle of the chest?)

We don't lay these heavy trips on the kiddies any more, man. Now it's all rainbows and butterflies. But the notion of a heart on fire, visible for all the world to see, seems to grow in resonance as I get older. Today, those mystic nuns would probably be getting Risperdal if they reported seeing this stuff, but the truth of a mother's heart being pierced for her child just gets truer as your kids get older. And the notion that a path to God's mercy could be found through such a heart--pure, vulnerable--is sweet and intuitive. There are worse ways to start the morning.

Bonus Immaculate Heart

It's not easy to find depictions of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that don't conform to the looky-here iconography of the holy cards. But the Blessed Mother in this 1901 painting by Charles Bosseron Chambers is a darling. (He also painted Ziegfield girls.) The passionate heart is just suggested. But it's still in the wrong place. But I quibble.