Two young men, brothers, were in the living room after supper, arguing, making explicit what had been simmering through the meal. The mother, listening, was meanwhile washing the dishes in the kitchen. The argument grew hot, the words ugly and mean. She finally had enough of it, wiped her hands, went into the living room and said to them with some emphasis: "Enough! This house is blessed. Would you bring a curse on it with your ugly words? Peace. Or get out. And I mean it." They were so stunned that they cooled their tempers.

This house is blessed. Every house is blessed. Every home is holy. Blessing does not make it so. Blessing declares it. To violate a virgin consecrated to God is a sacrilege. But every women is holy to God and every sin against her is a sin against God. Violence done a priest brings penalties, for a priest is a man of God. But all men are of God, are dear to God. And so we are reminded of the general truth by the particular. We are bidden to reverence children for their angels looking on the face of God. Striking a child provokes the wrath of God, for the child is blessed.

We live and move and are in a blessed world, immersed in the presence and power of God, in touch with His beauty and loveliness. We do not bless the world, then, nor what is in the world, in order to sanctify them, but to awaken ourselves to the vision of truth, to the world that God made and gave into our care.

And how often we need to be reminded of that! How easy to see only the human in the human. How easy to take for granted what we always have. How gross it is to be mindless and thoughtless. So we bless from the beginning of the day to its end that we may live in reality. We bless the food we eat, the book we read, the work we do, the day we begin with the blessing at the start of Vigils, and we close it at night with the abbot blessing us all with the forgiving water. And now we will go into the fields to bless them, that God may bless our land, send us rain and sun, give growth to what we planted, supply our needs: our fields and the fields around us, the country we live in, with a mind to the hungry and the poor of impoverished countries.

Some find all this naive, medieval, bordering on superstition. Something like primitive religion, kin to magic and rain dancers. I wish I were so sure. All we have comes from God. We acknowledge that truth. Further, we make known our needs, and we know as well that all prayer is heard in accord with the will of God. So we are not above praying for rain.

When the doctor looked at the X-rays for Brother Octavius' ¹ legs and hips, he said to the abbot: "By the pictures, this man cannot walk." How then is he walking, and that these years? Love, maybe. When Brother Ambrose² had his head thrust through a windshield in a collision, he had to push half his throat back with his hand after. And when it was all over the doctor told him: "You have no business talking, you know." Doctors know what they can do and what they cannot do. So God can send rain.

May the good Lord keep a roof over our heads, food on our table, clothes on our backs, and green things growing on our land, and the sweet smell of rain be frequent in our woods and in our fields. This we pray to the Lord God of all, whose blessed world we live in, whose sons we are, and whom we dearly love. In Christ our Lord.   Amen.

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¹ Brother Octavius, from Cologne, Germany, entered Gethsemani in the early 1940's as a laybrother. Sometime in  the late '40's, while driving a fully loaded wagon of wheat to the monastery, he fell off the wagon between the  horses drawing it, and the steel-rimmed wheels of the fully loaded wagon rolled over his chest and hips, crushing them. He endured great pain for a long time, but recovered fully and eventually walked again with hardly any traces  of his injuries, working in the Gethsemani tailor shop till he died in 1988.

² Brother Ambrose another laybrother of Gethsemani and of Mexican background, was involved in a violent car-collision in the 1970's, causing his head to puncture the windshield of the car he was in. He too has fully recovered and, now in his 70's, is still hard at work serving the Gethsemani community.