How goes it with my soul during this Thanksgiving season? As I've said before, my journey to pray the hours using Thomas Merton's A Book of Hours continues to be fulfilling, and challenging, during this time of year when there are so (too) many things to do. I remember to pray at the Dawn hour, at mid-Day, at Dusk, and in the Dark hour, and this ritual has helped center me in many ways, calling me to tune into the special moments at work, at lunch, at rest, etc. This attentiveness to the ordinary reminds me of the chapter in the book Seeds of Faith in which we are asked to practice prayer in ways that rejuvenate us.
A few Sundays past, one of the lections invited me to reflect on the power of prayer, and most pointedly, Hannah's prayer. The readings started me thinking of how I normally pray, and how fervently I do pray. Is it a primary part of my daily ritual? Is prayer even a part of my daily ritual?
In addition to reflecting on the ways in which I pray, I also began focusing more closely on how Eli mistakes Hannah's praying as drunkenness. After she feasts, Hannah prays, but does so silently. Because he is only reading her lips, and because he misread the context of the feast preceding her prayer time, Eli chastises Hannah for displaying drunkenness. How interesting that a priest, a man of God, would make such a mistake. Unable to see Hannah's deep sadness and intense distress, Eli tells her to put away her wine. How long does it take for a holy man to fall out of Love and out of Grace in such a way that prevents him from reading the signs? Perhaps it had been far too long since he last witnessed such earnestness in prayer. Perhaps it had been too long since Eli had experienced anything similar to Hannah's suffering. Perhaps he had forgotten how to recognize sadness.
This week's Gospel reading invites us to pay attention to signs, to not be lulled into passivity and complacency, to stay awake, to take note that "worldwide suffering accompanied by unstoppable cataclysm...marks the promised redemption (GBOD Worship). In Luke chapter 21, the people are told that the signs pointing to the new world, new kingdom, are quite different than what they expect. If they do not stay awake and attentive, they will misread the signs. And perhaps they will not only lose focus, but will miss the signs entirely.
As I mull over this text, I keep thinking back to the movie "2012" which I saw recently. Like many other movies of the cataclysmic-end-of-world genre (e.g. "Day After Tomorrow", "Armageddon", "Deep Impact"), 2012 also deals with signs. It begins with signs pointing to the earth's ecological destruction and ends with signs of renewal, rebirth, humanity (or attempts to gesture towards an ideology of justice, peace, equality, love). There are, of course, characters in the movie who are identifiers and interpreters of signals -- both the environmental/ecological signals and the other, more intangible signs of community, life, humanness. What's interesting is this: whether they are attempting to read signals emitted by the earth (recognized by massive, destructive earthquakes and tsunamis), or they are reading subtler, more nuanced behaviors demonstrating a certain kind of compassion, some "get it" (the signals) from the very beginning (the Woody Harrelson character maybe? or the scientist protagonist?) and attempt to broadcast/interpret what they see. Some don't "get it" until the very end (there are several characters that I can think of in the moview, but I'm also remembering Eli who finally understands Hannah's situation). No matter what, there is always a messenger, a voice calling out in the human desert, interceding on behalf of others, on behalf of humanity.
For me, the challenge this week is not in reading the temperatures to gauge whether the earth will explode, or whether the ice caps will melt causing tsunamis, or whether earthquakes in California will send me floating out into the Pacific. I'm unable to read the stars or the sun or the moon.
For me, the invitation is to pay attention to the human signals, those emitted and transmitted by the people around me/us, who are oftentimes difficult to understand. It is, in a way, similar to Eli attending to Hannah's signs of distress, finally being able to recognize her sad countenance which was later transformed after her prayers were interceded by Eli. The community within which I live, work, and play provides the barometers to which I/we should attend. Those are the signs telling us there is food to be served, there is hunger to be fed, there is disease to be cured, there is homelessness to shelter. There is compassion to be shared and experienced.
Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength...
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