Your words are what sustain me. 

They bring me great joy 

and are my heart's delight, 

for I bear your name, 

O LORD God Almighty.

--Prophet Jeremiah

grant me, lord, provider of our fathers

a city of refuge
and a room within

“O Holy Spirit, descend
plentifully into my heart.
Enlighten the dark corners
of this neglected dwelling
and scatter there
Thy cheerful beams.”
Augustine

Since he clings to me in love, I will free him;

        protect him for he knows my name.

When he calls I shall answer: “I am with you,”

        I will save him in distress and give him glory.

Psalter XCI          

The very next day 
they began to eat
unleavened bread 
and roasted grain
harvested from the land.
The manna stopped
the day after they ate 
this food from the land

Joshua v

help me know Lord
help me believe
that you will sustain me just the same
till the land can bear crops once again

Prayer of Rest

Take care of me, Lord.

Carry me home.

go thou before me
be thou within me
oh God of mercy
oh God of might

give our lives liturgy and our methods mystery. 

may we live quiet and thankful lives on the earth you put us on,

both now and in the age to come.

help me, holy spirit
with this task
to worship you

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.

Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

--Schlegel

you know my fears and troubles
how wayless in the fog I feel
my comfort, my comfort here
is that Lord you know.
that you know.

put in me
a nest, oh lord
fill it with many eggs
containing hope
which hatch when the heat of all of these pressures sits upon me

my college days in the dorm were shaped by an abbot,

a man who worked for the school whose connection to the ancients marked the way he thought and spoke. we invited him to be our abbot one summer as we, a group of three in a little house, began a monastic order of sorts. some reflections, things that came out of those days with the abbot:

Not necessarily an order, but a matured approach to life that is spiritual.  Maturated, a delicious sense of grammar to our day-- good poetism;  wisdom, gruffness, strategy, cheerfulness;  a full manhood.

Rest from your inordinate desire of knowledge,

[source]

    for therein is found much distraction and deceit.

Those who have knowledge
    desire to appear learnèd,

    and to be called wise.

Many things there are to know
    which profiteth little or nothing
    to the soul.

And foolish beyond measure is he
    who attendeth upon other things

    rather than those which serve to his soul's health.

And many words satisfy not the soul.        Mr. Kempis

near the cathedral at a bistro in seoul one sunday after mass,

the deacon from burma and i were enjoying a pizza when he asked with shock, 'really? well, how can it be that you aren't married?'

i responded that my bride's bus was late. i am simply waiting (and waiting) for it to arrive.

he was puzzled.  but after explaining to him the brilliance of my humour
(which he did get a kick out of in the end), he responded,

"sentence stress" is a necessary linguistic component of english.

verbs and other important words in every spoken sentence receive a tiny amount of stress as they are uttered.

Stress
ˈ◌
IPA number	501
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ˈ
Unicode (hex)	U+02C8
[source]

try this one: i couldn't finish the project because i was too ill. invariably the most operative words receive a tiny bit of stress. i couldn't finish the project because i was too ill. it's really tiny, but it's there (and this tiny linguistic necessity is not, i imagine, what bonhoeffer was talking about when he calls God's people to refrain from adding tones and dramatism to the readings of God's word. rather i mean the little intonations that keep us from sounding like robots).

so anyway, we often read romans iv like this:

Once inside the whale,

Once inside the whale,
Jonah sees the error
of his ways, after which
God makes the whale
spit out Jonah. [source]


just happened to me too.


thank God for the shore.
and for the whale.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;

Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Hen­ry F. Lyte, 1847.

Pietà

michelangelo's breathtaking Pietà is surely reflected in the second-last scene of the film.  after endless gazing and reflecting on it while studying the relationship between art and faith in the vatican this winter, it jumped out at me in the film.

as for the final scene in the clip (the open tomb), it is summarized in handel's scripture-to-music masterpiece better than i can do:

So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.

And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.