Lend me your hope

Lend me your hope for awhile, 
 I seem to have mislaid mine.
Lost and hopeless feelings accompany me daily,
   pain and confusion are my companions.
I know not where to turn;
   looking ahead to future times does not bring forth
   images of renewed hope.
I see troubled times, pain-filled days, and more tragedy.

Lend me your hope for awhile,
   I seem to have mislaid mine.
Hold my hand and hug me;
   listen to all my ramblings, recovery seems so far distant.
The road to healing seems like a long and lonely one.

Lend me your hope for awhile,
   I seem to have mislaid mine.
Stand by me, offer me your presence, your heart and your love.
   Acknowledge my pain, it is so real and ever present.
I am overwhelmed with sad and conflicting thoughts.

Lend me your hope for awhile;
   a time will come when I will heal,
   and I will share my renewal,
   hope and love with others.

Anon

Father & Son

There is the family photograph

That is your father’s face,

There is your father’s father

Grey-gathering years apace;

The son, bright-eyed in the morning,

The father, lined and drawn,

The son became the father

On the day that you were born.

We’ve all set out on the highway

Our fathers wished us well,

The sons became the fathers

In the same distinctive spell;

The road of all beginnings

Is all there is to lend,

But many a twist, and many a turn

Has marred us at the end.

He was my father’s father,

I am my father’s son,

We’ve travelled as far, and farther

Than our father’s years have run;

The twists and turns of fortune

Mean nothing, lost or won,

But the love of a father’s father,

And the love of a father’s son.

David Lewis Paget

We shall not cease from exploration

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

TS Elliot

From Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

Shancoduff

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,

Eternally they look north towards Armagh.

Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been

Incurious as my black hills that are happy

When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.

My hills hoard the bright shillings of March

While the sun searches in every pocket.

They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn

With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves

In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff

While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush

Look up and say: "Who owns them hungry hills

That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?

A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.

I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?

Patrick Kavanagh

Examen of Conscience

The idea behind the Examen of Conscience is to allow the Lord to search your heart. This prayer should be prayed in the spirit of Psalm 139:23-24. The idea is not to simply beat ourselves up over our sin or to do self-analysis, but rather to open ourselves to God in light of the truth of one’s heart. As with the questions for the examen of consciousness, the following questions are simply meant to trigger exploration, and can be changed or added to. Set aside twenty minutes in a place that you will not be disturbed for this prayer exercise. Allow ten minutes for reflection and ten minutes for confession. Do not be concerned with getting through all of your sins, but rather be open to whatever the Lord reveals. You may spend your entire time reflecting on one or two sins and confessing those, or you may find yourself recalling and confessing a number of them.

Open myself to God regarding:

• What my idols are
• What my unhealthy attachments are
• What my vices are
• What my desires and beliefs are that are not ordered toward God
• Confess these areas of sin

A meeting in A Part

In a dream I meet

my dead friend. He has,

I know, gone long and far,

and yet he is the same

for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,

grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,

ask: "How you been?"

He grins and looks at me."

I been eating peaches

off some mighty fine trees."

Wendell Berry