Sunday, March 23, 2003

Sunday evening

For the liturgy in the English service we used a Service of Holy Communion for Peace. The first thing that struck me was that an Orthodox refrain, The Trisagion, was spoken in the confession:
Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal,
have mercy on us.
Although we spoke it at this Lutheran service, I was singing Tchaikovsky's haunting rendition of the words to myself.

The use of the word "shock" in one of the prayers jolted me:
Let us pray for the victims of war. . .
God of compassion and grace,
you remember all who suffer.
Even as we engage in combat,
may we also engage with even more intensity in acts of compassion:
to comfort those in shock, bind up the wounded,
feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless,
bury the dead, and console those who mourn.
God of mercy,
grant us your salvation.
Change of subject. Yesterday I walked to the library, found My Ántonia by Willa Cather, came home, and read it straight through. It is a wonderful book. In the foreward, Kathleen Norris describes the novel this way:
[I]t...explores childhood affections, dreams once held dear, in the light of an adult awareness of displacement....My Ántonia is a continual revelation of stories that linger in the memory (pp. xiii, xviii)

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