one lime, two beers, three friends, six cats

dan phillips asked one his blog, "when do you pray?" the wednesday morning discussion group i'm priviliged to enjoy, usually josh and jeff and bradley and me, have all been on trips of some sort or another the past week or two, so this week we were sipping around the question of how we maintain our spiritual disciplines, such as they are, whilst trippin'. not a new question, granted: "how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?' do we just hang up our harps?

but sometimes the trips are little, or so they seem. i have been in babylonian captivity this week in a very small but effective way. i'm housesitting for a friend who leads a very cluttered life, with televisions in every room, computer moniters galore, and six cats. so last night, into the midst of this confusion (i'm easily confused), come ryan and josh, to share a cheap mexican beer with an expensive co-op lime and to catch up, while keeping the cats company. josh is allergic to cats, so he skipped the beer.

and we're talking all spiritual stuff, being all spiritual guys, and feeling cool and having a good time, and josh is telling ryan about his past year's discovery of deeper and simpler prayer, and i'm telling ryan how pleased i am to have found a friend like josh who is crazy enough to share psalms every morning and evening, when it strikes me full in the forehead that in the clutter of being amongst the cats at 8:00 to drink our beer, we had left out the psalms.

so. we stopped and prayed the psalms together. simple. psalms 141, 16, 62; a passage from the gospel according to luke (4:16-22); the magnificat; the our father.

behold, no longer were we captives, but pilgrims. this morning i found most of the lime on the cutting board by the sink, a little dry from the time in the desert.