SWEET SENSATIONS

Creator of all things,
let me thank You for sensations,
our gifts of seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling and tasting.

Help me remember always, that I live only briefly, as a visitor passing through
the sensate world en route to my eternal destination.

Let me be appreciative, though,
for every lovely vista and each bright new invigorating day that this good earth has
to offer.

Thank you, God, for clean sheets
and soft beds, nuzzling dogs and purring cats, candy corn and sizzling steaks,
cloudbursts and leafy trees, motorcycles, mountains, fountains, and, yes, hills alive with the sound of music.

Let me bless You for moon-glow, ice-cream cones, campfires, the chill of winter, shooting stars in vast dark skies, rainbows, banjos, beaches, smiles and sunshine, fireworks and footballs, enduring friendships, warm embraces:
all Your gifts of sight and scent and sound
and touch and taste which make us joyously alive each day, if we will only pay attention to the life around us.

Make me also sensitive to those who do not have the gifts which You have given me:
the deaf, the sightless, the mentally confused, the lame and the bedridden.

May I keep their challenges always
in my prayers as they journey on their own different and difficult paths to You.

Lead me always to see beyond this gaudy,
sweet, material world to Your heavenly arcadia beyond the galaxies.

Let me not live for the earthly moment
but for the timeless clocks of heaven.

Keep me conscious that this brief world
we know is but a passing phantasm, a circus of sensation: but paradise is infinite
and eternal.

Strengthen me, too, Lord, to endure bravely
disappointment, angry words, illness,
aches and arguments, exhaustion,
and the sometimes overwhelming moods
of inadequacy, depression and despair,
endemic to this earthy life below.

Guide me to see these negative sensations
as warnings not to let love of this poor life
hide from me the path to the next world,
and not to wallow in self-pity and depression
or luxuriate in idleness and self-indulgence,
when I should be keeping my inward eye
on heaven.

Let me be continually conscious
of Your sacrifice on the Cross,
made to cancel all the sins and wickedness
of a world in which we sometimes forget
to hope beyond the horizon and beyond tomorrow.

As I eat my daily bread, then, and cake
and candy, too, and travel, and listen
to music, and glory in sunsets and surprises,
keep me still aware that that these pleasures
are the tiniest, inadequate, vaporous,
infinitesimally tiny glimpsing foretastes
of the delights of Your heavenly home
and its inexplicable eternal pleasures
which "eye hath not seen nor ear heard."

Please Lord God, I beg You, welcome me there
one day, as I leave the frivolous sensations
of this gaudy globe behind.

Help me focus on the Holy Cross
and its meanings, and not on the gaudy, transient distractions of the material world.

Amen

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