OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Eighteen RITUAL II

In keeping with the same theme, I'd like to acknowledge this ritual of daily writing as an extremely good thing.  Although sometimes I just don't feel it and I have to stretch to say anything at all, it's really not that hard to come up with at least one good thing to praise in a day.  Besides it keeps me on my toes, provides a deadline and sharpens my writing skills.  Now there's a list.

Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, a Christian contemplative, "calls gratefulness the heart of prayer" (Borysenko, 1994).   He thinks of it as a way to become mindful and tries to think of something he has never been grateful for before going to sleep each night. He has devoted his practice as a monk to the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism.  He is a founder of the Center for Spiritual Studies and A Network for Grateful Living, which promotes gratitude as a force for change in the world.  Joan Borysenko devotes May to the learning of mindful gratitude as a release from suffering in life.  This includes the Jewish gratitude blessings or brachot - gratitude to God for every kind of wonder:  stars, plants, the chair we sit on, the food on the table.  At the risk of sounding like Martha Stewart I give blessings for the parsnip I just made into soup.  It is a "good thing."  

Blessed art Thou, Creator of the Universe 

who has given us the first star of the evening, 

the cleansing rain, the lowly parsnip in my soup, 

and the little dog who wants to clean my soup bowl.

Our little dog is a real creature of ritual: the morning pee on the lawn, the midmorning nap on our pillows, the mid-afternoon walk up the street to poop, the ritual c-o-o-k-i-e after the walk, the plate to clean when her humans eat.   This is even more true now that she is 15 years old and blind and deaf. Without ritual, routine and familiar territory she'd be lost.  She won't even go in the car anymore, but is perfectly happy in her proscribed little world.  She is very grateful (if a bit entitled) for every plate she gets to clean.

Another ritual that occurred today in Fatima, Portugal was the canonization of two shepherd children, siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto.  On May 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to them and foretold visions of the coming of WW I & II and communism, and urged them to pray for peace.  Their small farm town soon became one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in Europe.   Today Pope Francis said mass before their tombs surrounded by crowds of faithful who had come for healing. Young nine-year-old Brazilian Lucas Baptista was said to have fallen from a window in 2013 and become severely brain damaged, but was now entirely cured by prayers to the shepherds of Fatima, thus providing the miracle for the two youngest saints to be canonized.  Pope John Paul II beatified the siblings in 2000, because one of the predictions revealed to them by the Virgin was purported to be the death of a pope by gunshot, which almost occurred on May 13, 1981 (the same day as the original vision), in St. Peter's Square when an assassination attempt was made on the pope's life.   He credits the Virgin Mary with saving his life.  The bullet now sits in the crown of the statue of the Virgin in Fatima.   

Jacinta and Francisco, the youngest persons ever to be deemed saints, were threatened with being boiled in oil (according to ABC news) unless they recanted their visions, but they were steadfast and the Portuguese church eventually recognized the stories.  They died not long after in 1919 during the great Spanish flu pandemic, both under age 12. Their sister Lucia kept their story alive and died in 2005.  She will be canonized someday as well.   This seems an historic and hopeful ritual in light of the violence and negativity of the world right now and a mystery to contemplate.

Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia Marto 

Pope Francis and Lucas Baptista 

The Pontiff and the Virgin of Fatima