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READINGS: 1. Our first reading is a little story I love, and have used once before, from Mark 2:23 - 27: One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pick some ears of grain. The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which it is lawful only for the priests to eat, and he also gave some to his companions." Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath..." 2. Our second reading is from an essay by Brian Doyle entitled "Grace Notes": When have I been filled with grace? One time above all others, when my son was under ether. He was born with a broken heart, an incomplete heart, part of a heart. Not enough to keep him alive. Twice doctors cut him open and cut into his heart. Twice I waited and raged and chewed my fingers until they bled on the floor. The first operation was terrifying, but it happened so fast and was so necessary and so soon after the day he was born with a twin brother that we all, mother father sister families friends, staggered through the days and nights too tired and too frightened to do anything but lurch into the next hour. But by the second operation my son was nearly two years old, a stubborn funny amiable boy with a crooked gunslinger's grin, and when a doctor carried him down the hall, his moon-boy face grinning at me as it receded toward awful pain and possible death, I went somewhere dark that frightens me still. It was a cold black country that I hope never to see again. Yet out of the dark came my wife's hand like a hawk, and I believe, to this hour, that when she touched me I received pure grace. She woke me, saved me, not for the first time, not for the last. And as I finish writing these lines I look up, and my heart-healed son runs past the window, covered with mud and jelly. The father who wrote
that beautiful passage about his son |