Friendship of a Different Kind

The alarm goes off at 6:40 a.m. in the desert.  Time for Joe to stretch a couple of times, dress and get up to St. Benedict's Hall at Holy Trinity Monastery for a first cup of coffee before Morning Prayer at 7:00.  Me?  Usually I listen to NPR for a half an hour before putting my feet on the floor, going to the iPad and clicking on Creighton's Daily Reflection.  That's 'usually'; today was an exception.  A Memorial Mass was being said for my dear friend Thelma Meyer's husband, Vern, who died six months ago today.   A good man and a good friend, the least I could do was to forget the fact that sleep came late, morning all too early and get myself up and out.

It seems, when I look life in the eye, that in stepping off the well worn path the eye sees so much more clearly.  In the early morning with the sun coming up and shedding a golden light on the mountains in the west,  I simply had to pause at the crest of the hill and drink in the beauty.  Turning to my right, my eye caught a glimpse of a statue of the Blessed Mother standing serenely on an island in the center of Spirit Lake while a covey of ducks paddled by. A cool breeze wafted over my face, the Spirit a movin'.   All was still and the words of a meditation by Al Fritsch, SJ, a priest in Appalachia, came to mind:

        The sign of a true friend is to listen well,
           but to do so one has to remove himself from himself
        and enter into another's world.  
       What we seldom remember is
         that the earth speaks to us, too. 
       But the earth is old, and speaks quite softly.