Author Archives: frdavid11

I’m sharing this Easter Prayer on Pascha, rather than Easter because I can. But originally it was, as you can surmise, offered on Easter Sunday. The feast mentioned is the special meal that the command planned as a morale boost for the crew, but, for logistical reasons made more complicated by COVID restrictions, did notContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 16 April”

I suppose it’s the same everywhere, but a Sailor has to mark his career with specific achievements if he or she wants to promote to the next higher paygrade. Sometimes in our efforts to gather accomplishments and accolades, we forget that only we remember our achievements, and everyone else only remembers how we treated them.Continue reading “Daily Prayer, 15 April”

Celebrating significant holidays underway on deployment is tough for anyone, but it was especially tough during COVID. It was hard to imagine that my Holy Week on board a ship was closer to normal than the ones my brother priests were celebrating back home in the States. In order to observe the Easter/Pascha season, weContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 14 April”

Easter season is spring time, and the renewal of nature should inspire us to thoughts even deeper than the beginning of the baseball season. It’s a good time to look again at poetry. I’d like to share with you tonight another of my favorite poems. It’s by William Wordsworth and is a bit long, soContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 13 April”

This prayer is little out of order. I decided to put it here as a date-related commemoration rather than when it was prayed during deployment, which was right before we left our home waters after completing our certification to deploy. The crew had proved that they could fight the ship in a variety of warfareContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 12 April”

I can’t say if it is a growing trend, but it is certainly very common that the young men and women I counsel often tend to think that a change of scenery will solve all their problems. “If I could just get out of here.” It is a product of self-centered thinking that looks toContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 9 April”

One of the nice things about being a chaplain is that the Sailors will often let me participate in some of the work that they have to do. Not all of it, I found, because it seems there are just some things that a Sailor won’t let any officer do. But walking around and checkingContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 8 April”

I suspect that if you asked most Sailors who the Father of the Navy was, most would say John Paul Jones, who is certainly the most famous of the colonial era captains, and like today’s hero was not born in America, but in the British home islands. But only the subject of today’s story wasContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 7 April”

I often come back to the Civil War, because I believe that one must have a good grasp of what happened in America in the late 19th century to truly understand what and who we are as a nation. The biggest thing, put simply, is before the Civil War the United States “were,” after theContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 6 April”

It is shocking to behold the level of ignorance most people have these days for things once considered part of the warp and woof of American life, especially religious life. Even religious Christians are often hard-pressed to answer basic questions regarding their own faith, let alone that of other traditions. So, I make it aContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 5 April”