For Meditation: "reflect all heaven's propitious rays"

"Thy precious time mispent, redeem,
Each present day thy last esteem;
Improve thy talent, with due care,
For the great day thyself prepare.

In conversation be sincere,
Keep conscience as the noon-tide clear.
Think how all-seeing God thy ways,
And all thy secret thought surveys.

By influence of the light divine,
Let thy own light to others shine,
Reflect all heaven's propitious rays,
In ardent love, and cheerful praise.

I wake, I wake, ye heavenly choir,
May your devotion me inspire,
That I like you my age may spend,
Like you may on my God attend.

May I like you on God delight,
Have all day long my God in sight,
Perform like you my Maker's will,
O may I never more do ill."

Thomas Ken, A Morning Hymn (1685)

Ponder: "escaping time"

“Soon enough, the world of “the news,” and the raging primary campaign, disappeared from my consciousness. My mind drifted to a trancelike documentary I had watched years before, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence, on an ancient Carthusian monastery and silent monastic order in the Alps. In one scene, a novice monk is tending his plot of garden. As he moves deliberately from one task to the next, he seems almost in another dimension. He is walking from one trench to another, but never appears focused on actually getting anywhere. He seems to float, or mindfully glide, from one place to the next.

He had escaped, it seemed to me, what we moderns understand by time. There was no race against it; no fear of wasting it; no avoidance of the tedium that most of us would recoil from. And as I watched my fellow meditators walk around, eyes open yet unavailable to me, I felt the slowing of the ticking clock, the unwinding of the pace that has all of us in modernity on a treadmill till death. I felt a trace of a freedom all humans used to know and that our culture seems intent, pell-mell, on forgetting.”

Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being.”  New York Magazine.  20 Sep. 2016

Ponder: A Half-Life for Grief?

"For four hours, then five, then six, they trended Twitter hashtags like #Porte-Ouverte and #PrayforParish.  They laid French flags over their Facebook photos and shared images by artists like Jean Jullien.  And just as quickly, their posts reverted: back to quips about sports teams, viral videos, pictures with friends--now posted by little avatars striped in the French blue, white and red.

These posts feel somehow inappropriate--indecorous, somehow.  As if their very posters were telling jokes at a very somber funeral.  The world must move on, of course; no one's saying it shouldn't...Still it makes one wonder; Is there a half-life to grief?  And has the Internet shortened it, as it has all other things...

Maybe this "works," quote-unquote, in daily life: There's nothing inherently life-or-death in the Internet's weird time compressions, nothing wrong with 15 minutes of fame shrinking to something much smaller.  But after a tragedy like the one in Paris, we need time for sustained, contemplative thought.  And there is no time for anything, ever - the Internet moves on."

Caitlin Dewey, "Is Our Passage Through Grief Just One More Thing the Internet has Shortened?"  The Washington Post 21 Nov. 2015, E2