Prayer of a Soldier in France by Joyce Kilmer

Prayer of a Soldier in France

MY shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).

I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Another day that will live in infamy. My Lord! Why do we have so many violent people about, who just want to hurt the rest of society?
I'm not asking that they be obliterated. Merely wishing that such events do not happen. I feel sort of dead myself, sitting there and looking at the screne, watching the numbers of the dead rise: 20, 22, 30, 32. Will that be it now?
I didn't watch for very long because, as usual, the media was making me mad. "Largest masacre in US History!" Yeah right. Perhaps it is the largest single shooting in history, but there have been many other massacres on a much larger scale.
Lord have mercy on us.

Victor Borge playing Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

Lift the Wings

What are we living for? Well, I certainly hope it is something worthwhile, I mean something along the lines of more than the weekend, more than Dark Chocolate, more than Easter Eggs (mmm!). Why else are you alive if there isn't something worth living for? Suicide would not be wrong if there were not an ideal, a vision, a truth worth fighting for. Fighting? Open, belligerant actions against something? Why?!! Because that something for which one fights is besieged by something else that threatens to destroy it. What is worth it?

Education? Life? Religious faith? Apriori truth?

I'm a student: my head hurts, my legs and knees ache so bad at the end of the day that I sometimes find it difficult to climb into bed at night or walk down the hall. My shoulders ache from the weight of my backpack, my head pounds from the lack of sleep and the flourescent lights, my right arm throbs from taking notes, by feet hurt from going to work and class and class and work. Even my digestive tract is in rebellion against the cafeteria food. I haven't sat down and enjoyed myself for 4 days, had a deep conversation for nearly a week, and am beginning to wonder (as I do every week) is it worth it? Here I am in college to get a liberal and vocational Catholic education, to become a well rounded person so that I can better understand and rogress toward my transcendent end, to learn to think and act for myself: to form my own opinions, to know topics about which I am passionate, to be so well informed that I can take appropriate action. And here I am without even enough time or energy to even think about what I have done in the past 24 hour period, let alone my transcendent end or some apriori truth or historical fact! I don't have time to think about life, and here I am to learn how to think! Is this the way education should be? It strikes me as awefully ironic. Is this what God desires for me, that I be so swarmed with school that some days the only time I have to devote to Him is the time I spend brushing my teeth or getting dressed, or the time between when I climb in bed and when I fall asleep?

It is very difficult to not allow oneself to become overwhelmed, but it is essential. At least in my experience, one really cannot dwell in God or find any peace whatsoever if one doesn't just lay back and take the time to smell the air, admire the flowers. Take time to think, to pray. I know that for some, it would be a dream come true to be able to take time out just to think. It really is effective in preventing one from becoming burnt out, especially if you must live the gloom of the everday workaday world. Desipite the time and the drudgery, never forget your transcendent end, the reason that God created you in your mother's womb! Just ponder that for a minute, that God was perfectly happy without you in existence, yet he decided to bless your parents with a child: with you. How awesome is that! I mean, He knew that you wouldn't be perfect, and would cause Him alot of pain. Heck, if He allowed you to be created, just you, He would have had to die a horrible death on the cross! I don't know about the rest of you, but that rather blows my mind that anyone could love that much. I don't. I hope that someday I may mirror that love even a smidget. Then my joy would be such taht I would probably die of happines!

What are we living for? Why is life so painful, so drudging, fraught with boredom, overextension, frustration, lonliness and fatigue? Is there something worth it out there, worth the pain, the living, the dying, the frustration, the agony? If there were not, we would not be as we are, living, breathing, thinking beings with a transcendent end. Yes, there is a transcendent end. If you do not know what it is, Icannot tell you.

Homilys of a 6-year-old

So the other day Daniel, who is six, said Mass for Bernadette, our youngest sister, and my mother, father, and Deborah listened from the other room. He talked about how everyone has to die. Yeah. "Even though you are something, you can't be that forever...you won't be a girl forever, you won't be twelve forever...like if I wanted to be a policeman...I couldn't be that forever...even if I don't want to WE all HAVE TO DIE!!!" This was news to us. Here, all these years we thought we were going to have to stay on earth forever, but we don't! He emphasized the fact that we have to die even when we don't want to. His sermon about the worms and the height of the temperature in Hell is another that shall live in infamy.

Oscail an Doras (Open the Door)