Reading Rahner

I was working on an essay about praying the everyday, and (misquoted) Karl Rahner, SJ. My editor caught it, but it drove me to pull Rahner's The Need and the Blessing of Prayer off the shelf to find the full context. The chapter entitled "Prayer in the Everyday" is beautiful. If I'd re-read it before writing my own piece, I'd have been tempted to write simply.

Go read Rahner's "Prayer in the Everyday". The End.

"What can be of more astonishing exaltedness than the voice of the Spirit which makes the eternities quake and fills the abysses of God" when it carries our small, timid prayers to the very throne of God. "So that the earth's weeping is heard in the innermost chambers" of that place God built for himself. There is much to weep about in the current moment, and much to appreciate about Rahner's exhortation to simply "pray in the everyday; pray the everyday." in these times where one day blurs into the next.

What else am I reading? I just finished The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman who embedded himself in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in the 1990s. The melding of theory and praxis made me think about chemistry training, where you need to be able to see the dance of the atoms in your head, but also have the knowledge in your hands. 

I'm reading Mexican Gothic, a novel set in the mountains of Mexico, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I spent a summer living with my grandfather and his wife in a small town in the mountains outside Oaxaca, and the novel reminds me of my sense of dislocation. It's dark and 50s-ish and it glows. There's also some chemistry sprinkled here and there:

“She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way, the fungi chomping on the paste in the wall, causing unseen chemical reactions. She couldn’t remember the name of the fungus that had been the culprit—Latin names danced at the tip of her tongue, brevicaule—but she thought she had the facts right.”

Which has me reading William R. Cullen and Ronald Bentley's "The toxicity of trimethylarsine: an urban myth" (J. Environ. Monit., 2005, 7, 11-15).

But whatever you're reading, put it down for a minute and read John Lewis' last words to us. 

"Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way." 

Amen.