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Morning prayer at the Duomo

3/22/2023

I'm here in Florence. This is my second full day. I am grateful, once again, for an easy flight and now my cozy apartment and sunny skies. From the bottom of my heart I know this is God grace. I do my part, planning and staying attentive, but I know that I am in God's hands, and for that I am very grateful.
This morning, as I often do, I went to the side entrance of the Duomo, which is open for private prayer or for those attending Mass. Today, however, a large crowd of camera people and security guards surrounded the entrance. And there in their midst was a young man, sporting a very chic coat and holding a Gucci briefcase, solemnly walking a short distance among pigeons. Every so often someone would rush up to him to fix his hair or whatever, and then the man would go back to the start and make walk again.
I slipped into church and when I came out they were still at it.

Florence--amazing Grace

3/18/2023

I’m flying to Florence tomorrow, returning the 30th. Same wonderful plan: walking around with God, sitting with God in churches, drinking cappuccino, writing, visiting museums, eating the best food ever. It all fills me with delightful anticipation, appreciation of the moment, and deep gratitude. The rhythm of the early morning-- a walk before dawn, a pause for that first savory cappuccino, more walking as the light hits the Arno, a stop in a favorite church, time at a café where I will enjoy another coffee and a brioche as I write. All of that brings me to 9AM; the day has just begun.
I have no rational understanding of why this beautiful routine has been offered to me. But I do know that the offering is not of my own doing. It is God's grace and I do my best to use it well and to offer it back to the world.

Ten years and more of blogging

3/15/2023

I first started blogging in 2009 during the winter weeks when I rented a cottage by the sea in Maine, an hour and a half from my home. Thus was born <acottagebythesea.net> for those looking for silence, solitude, and simplicity, and who sometimes want to be alone. In early 2011 I started this blog, A Prayer Diary. I wanted to write about prayer, but I wanted to foist my faith life on my blog audience. I was aware that many who might long for the 'the cottage life', might not resonate with my Christian faith and my call to prayer. That decision is still feels like a good one. Each blog has led a separate life, and that will continue.
I've told very few people about A prayer diary. I put it out there on the internet as a free gift offering. In fact, for the most part, that has been true for A Cottage by the Sea. The one difference is they are now noted in the signature at the end of my email. I feel a renewed, or perhaps I should say a new energy to keep blogging, which I can do from my chair in my Angel Room or from Florence, where I'll be next week, praying in churches, visiting museums, enjoying a cappuccino and proving what my mother what's claimed: You can't get a poor meal in Italy.

Praying for physical and emotional healing

3/14/2023

Thank you for your prayers for my friend. All went well, although there is pain, and a long road to independence ahead for her. It was easy to pray for her healing and for the things to go well with surgeon and nursing staff. Praying for physical healing is just that. Of course, a prayer for things notto go well would be no prayer at all!
So what about prayers for mental healing? Like me, I'm sure you have people on your prayer list who are lost and suffering emotionally. Other than wanting them to be released from that pain, what do we pray for? How specific might we be? My prayer for them is less about specifics, and more about lifting them to the light and 'letting go and letting God." In the weeks and months to come, I will be including that kind of prayer for my friend.

Accept the mystery

3/10/2023

My best friend is having a shoulder replacement today. It may be happening right now. I have asked friends to pray for her . I know they are and I know their prayers will make a positive difference. The mystery of faith, however, is that I don't know what that positive difference will be. It may be just what I want--ease, no pain, a quick recovery. But it may mean something else. The mystery is that we don't know, the faith is that we believe it will be for the good. Even when things happen which are obviously not good in any of my usual ways, I try to turn to God and see, hear, touch, taste, and smell what God is offering me, which I believe is of the good.
Today I pray for my friend, accepting that so much is a mystery, believing that God is with her and with me, and knowing that is it of the good.

Dostoyevsky

3/9/2023

Hans Memling

At some ideas you stand perplexed,
especially at the sight of human sins,
uncertain whether to combat it by force
or by humble love.
Always decide,
"I will combat it with humble love."
If you make up your mind about that
once and for all, you can conquer the
whole world.
Loving humility is a terrible force;
it is the strongest of all things
and there is nothing like it.
Dostoyevsky

What daily bread do you need?

3/6/2023

What does Jesus mean when he asked us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”? He can’t be only speaking to the poor and the hungry. After all, I have plenty of bread and food to eat, and I know he is speaking to me. His prayer is universal; it is for everyone.
The brothers at SSJE (the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA) are currently offering a series of homilies on The Lord’s Prayer. In his comments on “Give us this day our daily bread,” Br. Liam invites us to consider what ‘bread’ each of us needs to respond to God's particular call to us. Br. Liam’s daily bread is 'an encounter with beauty.’ The ‘daily bread’ I need, to answer God’s call to intercessory prayer for individuals and situations, is solitude. What bread do you need?

https://issuu.com/ssje/docs/lordsprayer_complete_pages

Our Daily Bread
By Br. Lain Wilson
“We all have needs. We all have hungers. And I think that by identifying them, and in recognizing how these needs affect us physically, we can begin to recapture something of the immediacy and materiality of praying for our daily bread.”

February 24th, 2023

2/24/2023

“I am kind, except when I am not,” writes SSJE Br. Curtis Almquist in a February 10, 2019 sermon. He suggests that each one of us has a quality that we learned, most likely from someone from early childhood, which over the years defines who we are. Br. Curtis learned kindness from his paternal grandmother.
I learned to be hopeful from my mother. “I am hopeful, except when I am not.”
Br. Curtis names this particular way of being as our vocation, our calling from God. When I first listened to his sermon, “Vocation: The Call is Lifelong”, and then read it, I wondered what mine might be. And so, in longing and praying, the answer came. Hope has become the guiding light in my daily life because it is a God call. When I am stuck in negativity, confusion, anger, selfishness…, whenever I am not being hopeful, I stop and recall my vocation. The Holy Spirit leads me to turn back, and say, “I am hopeful.”
Email if you like an electronic copy of Hope Thoughts.
<bobbifisher.mac@mac.com>

www.ssje.org/2019/02/10/vocation-the-call-is-lifelong-br-curtis-almquist/

Invocation for Lent

2/22/2023

Invocation for Lent

Into the dark world
a snowdrop comes,
a blessing of hope and peace
carrying with it a green heart;
a symbol of God’s renewing love.
Come to inhabit our darkness, Lord Christ,
for dark and light are alike to you.
May nature’s white candles of hope
remind us of your birth
and lighten our journey
through Lent and beyond.
Kate Mclhagga

Dust to dust

2/21/2023

This prayer is from John Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer, a favorite prayer book of my mom’s. And now, like she did every day, I pray the morning and evening prayers from it. I love these prayers written, so it seems, in a way-back era, although only published in the last century, the publication date being 1957. Baillie’s Christian message is clear. We need’s God’s grace and mercy because we can’t rely on our own our own strength. On Ash Wednesday tomorrow we will be reminded, ‘You are dust and to dust you shall return.’

O God my Creator and Redeemer, I may not go forth to-day except Thou dost accompany me with Thy blessing. Let not the vigor and freshness of the morning, or the glow of good health, or the present prosperity of my undertaking, deceive me into a false reliance upon my own strength.