This constitutes our little altar, before which we say our family prayers.
Upon getting up in the morning, after drinking four glasses of water (a friend’s advice, to flush the toxins out), I seat myself before the altar for the Liturgy of the Hours (Morning Prayer), followed by a soulful reading of Scripture, what the Benedictines call Lectio Divina.
It seems easy enough. In fact, I often find myself going through with the routine, harried by distractions, losing not a little equanimity in the process. As likely as not, I get disorganized, unable to focus.
Because halfway through the Morning Prayer, from our gate, the fish vendor would announce her arrival in a stentorian voice, and enumerate the marine products on offer – fish, crustaceans, mollusks.
Since we live a little beyond striking distance from the wet market, and going there would require a bit of time and transport fare, not to mention that the fish vendor follows an uncertain timetable, a practice born less of character than capital, I would feel compelled, for the moment, to put down the breviary (dog-eared page last read duly earmarked) to check the freshness of her goods and the reasonableness of her terms, and then, deal closed, and parrotfish or grouper or both stashed away in the freezer, return to where I had left off.
Apart from the fishwife, I likewise would contend with the newspaper boy’s incessant, joyful squeezing of his bicycle horn, and our help’s animated telling of earthy stories to her colleagues in the kitchen, the juiciness of their content assuring that I would hear them despite the distance.
In such a situation, I would ask myself if by any chance I could pray at all, undisturbed from beginning to end. I would not move to an inner garden, because there striped mosquitoes with barbed probosces prowl among the creamy-white, metal lawn chairs under a palm tree that shoots upwards through a customized hole in the roof.
For that matter, I would find myself asking under my breath — just where could I find God?
Which the Jews in Jesus’ time would not find difficult to answer – one found God in the Temple in Jerusalem. And Jesus, knowing this only too well, felt disgust over what he saw – people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons in the Temple, and money changers doing business at their counters. John writes in his Gospel that, “making a whip out of some cord, he drove them all out of the Temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over and said to the pigeon-sellers, ‘Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.’”
Ironically, in that incident, when the Jews asked him for a sign to justify what he had done, Jesus in effect declared that thenceforth his own resurrected body would replace the Temple – “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.”
Of this Matthew L. Skinner writes, “Jesus’ raised body became a site (or did the author mean the site?) of God’s presence – a place where God is encountered in the world. Not confined to a single point on a map, Jesus serves as the ‘place’ where God is accessible.”
Since Jesus now dwells in his people (in his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes that “we, though many, are one body in Christ”), the line between the sacred and the profane fades and disappears. Now, therefore, I can pray wherever I want, and should consider the intrusion of the fishwife and newsboy and the help’s loud conversation as part of God’s presence, and they too should enter into my prayer. For ultimately every prayer should proceed in kindness, and follow the admonition that St. Benedict gives in his Rule – “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ.”