How Long, O Lord?

 

It is very early in the morning of the shortest day of the year, and  I am awake with my second cup of coffee.  My nearest neighbors are a flock of assorted birds, and their assertive rooster woke me, and my moving activated my 'smart watch' which told me that it was nearly time for Legacy Icons to stream Morning Prayer, so I thought, why not?  Television church always seems a bit odd to me, but it's an odd time and it has been another odd year.

So, I boil water and light a candle and hear psalms and troparia and a story of yet another virgin who wa martyred rather than let herself be defiled and a sermon about Elias and his prayers for drought and rain.  I am still a little punch drunk from having watched what has become my favourite Christmas movie,  Alfonso Cuarcon's adaptation of P. D. James' Children of Men.  I had first watched the movie in 2007, when it was first released on DVD.  Remember DVD;s.  They were a miracle that arrived soon after the radio.  I recommended it this year to a friend to watch as  the perfect movie for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, but he thought he might have to work that night, so we watched it on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.  When first I saw it, in bucolic Eureka Springs, the Seige of Seattle seemed like a fiction, and the Plague that had occupied the Earth by 2027 did, too.  Now, not so much.

Morning Prayer hurries along, as is normal in Orthodox services, a practice I still find a bit odd.  Is there really a great reward in heaven for him who can read Psalm Fifty the Fastest?  And then I listen to a video of Olafur Arnalds' Morning Sessions II.  Somehow I am shocked that Arnalds has become grey-headed.  How is it possible?  How long, O Lord, have I been enjoying his music, which is certainly as effective prayer as Elias'  How is it possible that already fourteen years have passed since I first watched Childreen of Men?  How isit possible that it is already another solstice morning, another Feast of St. Thomas, which only yesterday I celebated in the snows of Santa Fe.  I t was the deep midwinter of 1991, and I was taken with all things Celtic, and so we said the ThomasMass outside, processing a deep trench in the snow around the altar of cold stone, claiming the record for the coldest mass ever celebrated  intentionally  in Santa Fe history, before breaking fast at Pasqual's.  We of course prayed for peace.  Now eveyone from that little congregation is grey-headed or lying under the snow in that church yard where we had processed..

Arnalds at the piano seems like a grown-up Schroeder and I think that every Christmas is a Charlie Brown Christmas and that the question is always How long O Lord?  How long before we childen of men lean to number our days and apply our hearts to wisdom?  How long befoe we children of men might know the things which belong unto our peace?  Still, it seems, they are hid from our eyes.  How long, O Lord?  How long?