Ash Wednesday

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. The ashes represent mourning and repentance. Lent is to be a time of reflection and prayer. If you are not familiar with fixed hour prayer I hope you will try it this Lenten season. Below are a few sites that will walk you through the prayers.

http://www.universalis.com/-600/today.htm

http://www.northumbriacommunity.org/

A prayer from Thomas Merton's Dialogues with Silence:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Community

"Community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves."

-Wendell Berry

I have begun to see what individualism will do to community. Working with students makes this painfully clear. Without a second though a student will put everyone in the school/community in danger, and when they say they never thought of anyone else, they mean it. I have seen this same attitude in myself . We have turned self-reliance into a life-style and now our interactions with each other are devoid of meaning and depth. People don't ask for help, they keep their 'issues' private (even at church), we all demand certain behavior from others but excuse ourselves from that same standard. I think this is what made Berry observe,

"Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

E.J. Dionne is on to something...

"Republicans -- short on new ideas, low on votes and deeply unpopular in the polls -- have been winning the media war over the president's central initiative.

They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to "less than 1 percent of the overall package." But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts."

Read the whole article here...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/AR2009020402835.html