Posted: April 12

Time to Pray

(Rome) Wednesday in Holy Week and I am trying to finish up some projects to clean my desk before taking time to focus on the religious holy days. Of course, cleaning off the desk is more metaphor than fact, and the goals carefully made before breakfast go slipping ever further away as one small interruption after another forces me to focus on something else that I would rather ignore. Father Ron Wozniak came back to the Curia from Boston for a few weeks to help proof the revised database that has taken several years to get to the point where it is almost done. I have been doing the programming that allows Ron and the others working on it to use a browser-based internal web site to manage the data. It is actually much faster than directly working on the database. (Hurrah for Cold Fusion, the software I use for the task.) Only when somebody like Ron comes along and tries every feature in the application do you discover the little bugs that don't work. Whenever he finds one, the clean desk slips further away. But I usually find the missing apostrophe or the confused syntax, and voila, the program smiles again.

I didn't really want to be sitting in front of the screen so it did not take much temptation at all to get me outside after lunch. The sun was lighting up the early spring flowers in the garden. I grabbed my camera and invited Silvia who works with me along. She did not argue and pulled a small camera out of her purse. Surprise! We started off on the iris that have all opened up in the last few days. I painted the first one that appeared a week ago; now they are all gloriously open. The hydrangias have sprouted a full body of new leaves, but no flowers yet. The forsythia, however, have just opened up their pale lavendar flowers above the paths high up the hill side. And there were other plants whose names I don't know, but after six years here they appear like old friends who are just returning after a long winter's trip somewhere further south. Good to see them again, just in time for Easter. It occurred to me that the new blossoms are a perfect harbinger of the feast of the Resurrection, a promise that soon the roses will appear. Lent/winter is almost finished, and the season of rebirth is almost here. Leaving one's desk to appreciate the promise is not a temptation after all, it's prayer, "finding God in all things" to quote Ignatius.