Rabbi Stuart Halpern met a friend
who, the rabbi knew, had a relative critically ill with Covid-19 in
hospital. The friend said to the rabbi, You
know, I’m having trouble lately finding any kavannah. Kavannah is a Hebrew word, and it
means serious purpose. One biblical form
of the word means the arrangement of the permanent furniture in the house;
another usage actually denotes the place in the innermost part of the holy
temple where God dwells. This friend is
telling the rabbi that he is feeling the opposite, all over the place, scattered
and distracted. Perhaps you know that
feeling. One of my colleagues phoned me
shortly after his father had died, and he said, “I can’t concentrate, I can’t
settle to anything”.
An observant Jew prays three
times a day. Rabbi Halpern
comments: Kavannah is the
intentionality we’re commanded to muster when praying… real and true and
unmitigated gratitude to God for all His bounty. And if my friend, a rock of quiet faith,
couldn’t hack it, even in a time of a plague, I thought, we’re in trouble. I think there are two things here, and
they have to do with the nature of life, faith and prayer. The first is a Benedictine insight, that work
and prayer are inseparable. They are
interdependent – the hours of prayer in the monastery are called the Opus Dei,
the work of God. Simplistic Christian
teaching tends to separate work and prayer, Martha and Mary are seen as
different from each other. But the man
who couldn’t find his kavannah may need simply to go back to work.
In April/May 1945, Berlin along
with other cities in Germany and Austria lay devastated. The central city had been flattened by 24
hour bombing and by Russian artillery.
This is what they called Stunde Null, the Hour of Nothing, Zero
Hour… a shattered bewildered defeated and demoralised people now under strict orders
from angry occupying powers… the end of Nazi rule and the start of something else. This was when we began to see the Rubble Women,
the Trümmerfrauen -- the men being mostly in captivity or
dead or injured or trying to walk back home from far away. The first task in all the trauma was to pick
up bricks and stones. Thousands of Trümmerfrauen
got out in the ruins of Germany, organised themselves, demolished ruined
buildings, cleaned up ton after ton of bricks and stacked them properly, dealt
with masonry, with glass, with plumbing and wires, steel and wood… it is a
tremendous story. My point is that the work
began to restore steadiness and purpose, kavannah. Faith is sometimes, as we often say, simply taking
the next step, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what lies to
hand. Faith says, never mind about miracles,
don’t hang around for any deluge of comfort and reassurance, God is not about
to make it all right again… Do what
needs next to be done, in faith. Attend
to the children, phone a friend, see the doctor, weed the garden… whatever it
may be. And pick up your discipline of
silence and stillness in God’s presence.
Just as a ship, properly equipped with a rudder, will turn neither port
nor starboard until the ship is under way, so the believer with no kavannah
will get nowhere by sitting bothering about it.
Faith does not expect to know the end from the beginning or to have all
the boxes ticked. Now faith, says
the writer to the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1) And
as the plague and all its consequences seems to be shutting the doors on the
familiar past, and opening new doors and possibilities, good and bad, it is
time for the faith of silence and steadiness, calmness and kavannah… mostly
doing what needs next to be done.
No comments:
Post a Comment