Reflection
“Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.”
-Luke 11:2-4
He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,
and do not subject us to the final test.”
Learning to pray has been, and continues to be, a lifelong process for me. It started out as a child in my family and the local Immaculate Conception Catholic Church (mostly first- or second-generation Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants), served by three religious communities: the Sisters of Providence, the Resurrection Sisters, and the Passionist Fathers and Brothers. Each of these communities served me, my family, and my Norwood Park Community. Norwood Park itself was established in 1873 and was a mostly Protestant Lutheran and Presbyterian community. The Catholic communities above came here in the early 20th Century. I didn’t know it then, but I was very gifted. As a child, I presumed that the whole world lived as we did.
I was also served by the secular communities. We had many thriving businesses (we didn’t call them communities) like Shultz’s Hardware, the Edison Park Lumber Company, the bakery where, first thing in the morning, I was often sent as a child to get two freshly baked large loaves of white bread sliced and one rye without seeds. We also had a fish market where, on rare Fridays, one of us would get some shrimp for our Friday meatless meal. There was the nearby Hedlin’s Dairy and, of course, the Chicago Northwestern Railroad, which connected our small community to the rest of the world. O’Hare Field was still a small aviation field serving the nearby Douglas Aircraft Company. My father worked as a laundryman, not in Norwood Park but in the wider Chicago community, which did not have access to spacious, sunny yards to hang your laundry out to dry and farmland to raise cows. We also had the Norwood and Edison Park Public Schools where we went to kindergarten and met many of our neighbors. There was the Norwegian and Danish Old Folks Home and, of course, the Chicago Public Library. We didn’t call these all business connections then, but as I look at them today, they were surely the “connections” we were praying for in our religious communities.
I think after eighty-plus years I am learning to really appreciate what Jesus was trying to teach his apostles and us today: We are all connected in a world (I have personally come to dislike the word Kingdom) freely given to us and if we share this world freely with each other, yes, making mistakes but forgiving and being forgiven one day at a time, we will thrive.
I can’t think of a better “prayer vision” of these connections than the Rosary, with its Crucifix leading the way to a life of faith, hope, and charity, and then on to the mysteries of life, which are sometimes sorrowful, sometimes joyful, sometimes glorious, and all luminous and all connected. Thank you, Our Creator.
