Thouhgts on Sunday

Objectives for the day - learning how to Tweet, blogging, packing. I read the review of a favorite book recently, Dreaming in Hindi, that accused the writer, Kathy Russell Rich, of not revealing how she really feels. I know that is one of my problems, not being able to say how I feel because I haven't been able to analyze for myself how I feel. It's not that I don't feel - just that it is easier to react with vehemence but not with any greatly nuanced feeling. I'm going for the nuance.

It is Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was with us at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption; more or less in the form of poltergeists causing hymns to be announced too soon, almost forgetting to Pass the Peace, and people going for communion before their row was called. It was good to see error in a service that is usually flawlessly led by Pastor Dennis Lal.

I am going to quote a piece from The Chronicle, the Cathedral's newsletter:

A lifetime ago - or so it feels -Rev Kenneth Sharp conducted a retreat for young people at the School of Prayer in Rajpur, Dehradun. Like everyone else, I found some sessions especially meaningful, such as those built around meditation and reading, but chafed under others, such as the slightly dreary routine, or so at least it seemed to me, of organized prayer. I enjoyed however, the company of my new-found Prayer Partner, Jenny Hills from Nottingham. One after noon, when I was complaining of the vexations of a life of prayer she showed me a fragment of a poem that I learnt later was "Little Gidding," by T.S. Eliot. It read,
You are not here to verify
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. Your are here to kneel
Where prayers has been valid.
I enjoyed the poety - then as now - but decided Jenny was being a little over-enthusiastic about prayer.

Some years after that, when I was studying in Cambridge, I got a change to visit Little Gidding itself. It is a site in southeast England where prayer has been unbroken since an Anglican community first made its home there in the seventeenth century. This retreat was enjoyable because we were left to ourselves to wander down shabby muddy country lanes, exactly as in the poem, with the low, flat, featureless East Anglian countryside stretching as far a eye could see. We had a cheerfully austere Ploughman's Lunch of bread, cheese and fruit, the British notion of a ruralized meal no farmer has ever really eaten. Suddenly when we went in to pray, and my wrists hit the handrails, I remembered the phrase, "Your are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid." I reaslized what Jenny had been trying to say long ago, that against the importance of the act of prayer none of the irritations of life such as stagnation, boredom or discouragement ought to matter. I still don't think I'm good enough to agree, but when I now teach the poem "Little Gidding," to my Masters students in Delhi University I think of the long and twisting route I've gone down, and wonder very much what lies ahead.
Christel R. Devadawson