Before I left for NJ in late January, I went out to dinner with my 21-year-old niece, who is a senior at the University of Chicago – the place, according to its students, "Where fun comes to die." Although, as a recent admissions campaign has countered, this slogan may not be true, it is true that life has not been easy in recent months. Mounting debt, worries over what jobs may be available to help her pay it off are troubles that loom large for many university students, including my niece. After growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, it isn't always easy to find one's way in a large city and large university, especially when so many students connect through computer screens.
When I picked up my niece to go out to dinner, I expected her to be struggling with worry and loneliness. Instead I saw a kind of quiet radiance on her face – so noticeable that I commented on it. When we got to dinner and I asked how she was doing she told me about a new practice she had instituted in her life. "Every day," she told me, "I say out loud one thing I am grateful for. It has to be out loud," she told me, "because there is something about speaking out loud that means more than just letting a thought cross your mind. Saying it is different from just thinking it." She told me that something she heard recently was making sense to her: that we are not grateful because we are happy, but are happy because we are grateful.
I had heard this saying before. But I had not heard it from my 21-year-old niece with a shining face and a kind of quiet centeredness that I had not seen before. She told me that another of her resolutions was to go to church every Sunday. Every Sunday!?! She told me of the people she had met there of all ages; sitting down at fellowship with an older couple who expressed an interest in her life; an increasing number of people who call her by name; sharing in the rhythms of worship.
I think my niece is learning to watch and pray. She is learning to watch for signs of grace in her life; to voice her recognition that there are gifts for which to give thanks. She is practicing prayer as praise. I think that she is also practicing a kind of resistance against a passive helplessness in the face of all that is overwhelming; to begin to claim resources that are there for the claiming: an embodied community at weekly prayer and not just messages on a computer screen connecting her to others; the growing sense that faith is something that can be em-bodied; given flesh through actual practices.
Removed by decades of time and in social context, but not removed in the common struggle to choose life and hope over despair, I am also inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer, who I only know through the stories told about her life. She grew up as one of twenty children in a sharecropper's family on a cotton plantation in Mississippi. As early as six years old she knew the grind of labor in the cotton fields every day from before dawn to darkness. Steeped in the spirituality of the black church, especially its hymns and spirituals, she would sing her prayer as she worked: "O Lord, they said you'd answer prayer, O Lord, we sure do need you now, O Lord, you know just how I feel."
In August 1962 Hamer attended a service led by civil rights workers who urged people to stand up for justice by joining a voter registration movement. Their message made profound sense to Hamer – she experienced it as a call from Jesus – and she volunteered. Within a few weeks she traveled with seventeen other people to the county seat to register to vote. They were on a dangerous mission and people were afraid. As was so often to be the case on these missions, Hamer sang her encouragement: "Have a little talk with Jesus; Tell him all about our troubles, Hear our feeble cry, Answer by and by; Feel the little prayer wheel turning, Feel a fire burning, Just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.*"
Words about thankfulness and "little prayer wheels" that turn can seem so simplistic on the surface, like the phrase that is a resource to my niece in these days. I have spent most of my life as a teacher of pastoral care warning students not to respond to pain with a platitude. As platitudes offered to the suffering, such words can arose contempt in their hearers.
But as a testimony of people who struggle and suffer – this is quite another matter. Fannie Lou Hamer knew that not everything can be "made right" in the world through prayer. Hamer was evicted from her home, received many death threats by phone and mail, was kept under surveillance from the Ku Klux Klan and the FBI, and became the target of drive-by shootings. Early in the summer of 1963 Hamer and some friends were arrested and jailed in Winona. Miss, on their way home from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina. Over three days they were tortured and beaten, and as a result Fannie Lou Hamer suffered permanent damage to a kidney and an eye. Although charges were brought against her attackers, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
But Fannie Lou Hamer kept on keeping on, becoming one of the legendary leaders of the civil rights movement. Her struggle was grounded in prayer – simple and honest, full of both hope and lament. One of her biographers writes that Hamer believed that what she was doing only made sense finally within the context of the gospel story.**
It was through their prayer and song that Hamer and others remained connected with the Jesus we encounter in the Gospel text for this morning. It is the text that begins the season of Lent and the theme for this season: "Lord, teach us to pray."
Will you keep watch with me? Will you stay awake and pray? Jesus asks his friends. Will you "attend" with me to the whole of this life – its surprising gifts and grace, its anguish and suffering? It is hard to keep awake … to keep attending. Matthew never gives a rationale for why the disciples keep falling asleep. It is Luke who says that Jesus "found them sleeping because of grief" (Luke 22:45). It is hard to keep awake and alert when there are things that are so painful to experience, so hard to watch and endure. It is the Jesus who stayed awake, who rejoiced, suffered, and saw his mission through that was the inspiration for "keeping on keeping on" for Fannie Lou Hamer and so many other witnesses, who found sustenance, too, in the life of prayer and the life of connection to Jesus' life. Will we live with eyes wide open? May we find in Jesus' story, and the many testimonies to its power to shape and sustain our rejoicing and our struggling, our living and our dying, the inspiration to respond, on the threshold of Lent: We will try. We will try to stay awake … to watch and pray. Amen.
*The condensed portions of Fanny Lou Hamer’s story are taken from Kathleen D. Billman and Daniel L. Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayer of Lament and Rebirth of Hope (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999): 140-145. They were in turn based on several works, including Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton, 1993); Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
**Ibid., see Charles Marsh, 45.
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