Rest a while

Many will have heard of, and quite possibly read, some of the work of British author Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898).

His work “Alice in Wonderland” is on many schools’ library shelves.

Carroll also wrote a sequel to this book with the title “Through The Looking Glass”, in which Alice walks through a mirror (looking glass), and to her surprise, everything is back to front.

“I find this most confusing”, Alice keeps saying.

In the ‘through the looking glass’ world,

• • running keeps you stationary,
  • walking to where you want to go means you walk backwards and
  • chess pieces are alive, as a fairy tales.

I find this most confusing.

Today’s Gospel from St Luke (Lk. 18: 1 – 8) is the story of the persistent widow and the recalcitrant judge.

For most of my life I assumed the judge represents God, and the persistent widow represents me, and throughout the country, I can well imagine that preachers will be urging people to be faithful, persistent, and perhaps even aggravating in their prayer!

This Sunday, I invite you, like Alice, to step through the “Looking Glass” and take a journey where everything is back to front!

Stepping through the ‘looking glass’ we find everything ‘back to front’; the persistent widow represents God, and the recalcitrant judge ourselves!

Once reversed, the characters take on a whole new perspective.

The widow is seen as a God-like figure, and then the message of the parable becomes very much clearer.

Go on, have a go, reread the parable from ‘behind the looking glass,’ remembering, “to walk to where you wish to go, you have to walk backwards!”

Humour  aside: our English translation has the judge say to himself, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

The original Greek reads, “lest she give me a black eye by continually coming,” literally meaning to strike the face below the eye.

It comes to mean “brow beat,” but it also carries the connotation of shame, just as our expression does.

The judge will grant her justice lest he be shamed in the community.

Thanks to the book Schindler’s Ark, by Australian author Thomas Keneally and the consequent film Schindler’s List, the name Oskar Schindler became known to millions of people around the world.

Schindler was a German industrialist.

During World War II, he saved over a thousand Polish Jews from concentration camps. As the war ended, the Germans pulled out of Poland, and the people awaited the arrival of the Russians.

Just before the Russians arrived, Schindler too decided to flee westwards.

When his Jewish workers, now free, heard he was leaving, they got together to see how they could express their gratitude to him.

All that was to hand to make a gift was base metal.

Then one of them suggested something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework and said for his fellow workers to take the bridgework.

At first, they refused the man’s offer, but he insisted.

So, he had his bridgework extracted by a prisoner who had once been a dentist in Cracow.

A jeweller among them melted the gold down and fashioned a ring out of it.

On the inner circle of the ring, they inscribed these words from the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud: “The one who saves a single life, saves the entire world.”

It was a deeply moving gesture of gratitude.

That is one of the marvellous things about gratitude – it makes us want to give something back.

There is a French proverb, “La reconnaissance est la memoire du coeur” – ‘Gratitude is the memory of the heart’. But then someone might say that it was the least they could do since they owed their lives to Schindler.

The ten lepers in the Gospel also owed their lives to Jesus; yet only one of them came back to thank him!

Paul uses a very colourful image when he writes, “fan into a flame the gift that God gave you.”

I was reminded immediately of the old Irish custom which is called grieshog.

Grieshog, is the process of burying warm coals in ashes at night to preserve the fire for the following day. Instead of cleaning out the hearth, people preserved the day’s glowing coals under beds of ash overnight to have a fast-starting new fire the next day.

In the morning, the householder brushed aside the ashes and added new fuel to the still-hot coals to stoke the fire up for the new day’s warmth and cooking

The primary concern, then, was that the fire from yesterday not be permitted to burn out completely at the end of the day.

On the contrary, the coals hidden from sight under heaps of ash through the long, dark night were tended carefully so that the fire could leap to life again at first light.

The old fire did not die, it kept its heat, in order to be prepared to light the new one.

It may well be an image and a custom worth our reflecting on; sit quietly for a time and consider, “what coals, hidden from immediate sight, might, when laid bare to the breath of God, ‘fan into a flame’!

The prophet Isaiah writes, “See it is I who have created the smith, who blows the fire of the coals, and produces an instrument fit for its purpose”. (Isaiah 54: 16)