VICTORIA ENCISO (Congregant, Good Shepherd Catholic Church, Chicago): From the moment you wake up, you kneel like a camel, and I wake up like a camel. You know how a camel wakes up, with both knees? I wake up praying.
VALENTE (to Ms. Enciso): So you wake up in the morning and you immediately get down on your knees and pray?
Ms. ENCISO: And I bless my blanket that I have and the house that I have, because if you don’t then what do you have?
VALENTE: The devotional life of Hispanic Catholics takes some dramatic forms. On a frigid December night people from Good Shepherd walk through the streets of Chicago, a procession in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe. At five o’clock the next morning, their church is packed for the mananitas, an hour of singing praise to the Virgin.
Wow! When was the last time an Episcopal or Anglican church was filled with people for Matins?
Wasn’t it just a bit ago that the story was how the Catholic Church in the U.S. is losing the hispanics? Failing to minister to them?
This is not unusual. What is unusual is that we in the ‘West’ have lost sight of this practice.
There is a great body of work on the Celtic way of prayer that shows the Celtic Christians also prayed that God would bless everything from the milking of the cows and the making of butter, to the fishing boats. A good book resource is Esther de Waal’s “The Celtic Way of Prayer”. An internet resource is the online collection of [url=http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/corpus/Carmina/] the Carmina Gadelica[/url], prayers and poems collected by Alexander Carmichael in and around Scotland in the late 1800’s.
One example from the latter is the prayer for kindling the morning fire:
[blockquote]BLESSING OF THE KINDLING
I will kindle my fire this morning
In presence of the holy angels of heaven,
In presence of Ariel of the loveliest form,
In presence of Uriel of the myriad charms,
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
Without fear, without terror of any one under the sun,
But the Holy Son of God to shield me.
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
Without fear, without terror of any one under the sun
But the Holy Son of God to shield me.
God, kindle Thou in my heart within
A flame of love to my neighbour,
To my foe, to my friend, to my kindred all,
To the brave, to the knave, to the thrall,
O Son of the loveliest Mary,
From the lowliest thing that liveth,
To the Name that is highest of all.
O Son of the loveliest Mary,
From the lowliest thing that liveth,
To the Name that is highest of all.
[/blockquote]
My God rekindle in our hearts the desire to bless everything in our lives and work to Him!
Jim Elliott <><