Ash Wednesday Prayer from U2 (Yahweh)

On this Ash Wednesday, here is a heartfelt prayer from U2 that I thought would be appropriate.

Yahweh

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street
Take these shoes
And make them fit
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist no
Take this mouth
So quick to critisize
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up
The sun is coming up on the ocean
His love is like a drop in the ocean
His love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will
What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break

Ash Wednesday/Blackbird

Excerpts from Ash Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

                        
                      *****

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.




Blackbirdby Paul McCartney

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.


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Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. Traditionally, it is a time to remember our mortality as we enter the penitential season of Lent in preparation for Easter. For me, it serves as a natural marker, a seasonal event to remind me to take stock of my life. Perhaps it is natural that I should now think back to a time of introspection some 25 years ago.

It was around my 30th birthday that I decided to spend a few days at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. Gethsemani is the trappist monastery best know as the place where Thomas Merton lived after taking vows in the order. Mine was a personal, unstructured retreat. I prayed the hours with the monks, hiked in the Kentucky woodlands, and ate the simple fare offered at the monastery. At the end of my stay, I stopped by the gift shop and left with some excellent cheese and fruitcake (crafted by the monks there), and at least one insight which I wrote down in the poem that follows.




A Small Brown Bird, a Red Bandanna, and a Fat Man Coughing
(Day One at a Trappist Monastery)

I'm not sure I know what a distraction is.

Today I spent a couple of hours walking through
the autumn woods near Gethsemani Abbey.
A small brown bird caught my attention as he
chirped and flitted among the bushes
down by a pond.

During afternoon prayer
a monk pulled out a red bandanna
and blew his nose.
It was just like the bandannas Dad gave
my brother and me when we were children.
We loved our bandannas, and we used them
to wipe sweat, to be cowboys, to be hobos,
and to carry Mom's oatmeal cookies.

By one small act, this monk
brought a part of my childhood
before God.

There was a fat man in the guesthouse.
I kept seeing him there.
He chain-smoked cigarettes and coughed every fifteen
seconds.
I drank a cup of coffee in the next room.
I kept hearing that fat man cough.
I read about Julian of Norwich in the library.
I heard the hacking cough - like a carpenter's saw
every fifteen seconds.

Did the bird make me forget the autumn woods?
Did the bandanna interrupt my prayer?
Did the fat man's cough disturb my inner silence,
or did it punctuate my inner noise?

I'm not sure I know what a distraction is.



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