Daily Reading for November 2 • The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, and the Feast of All Saints
The subway car tears through the darkness of the tunnel and blasts into the light of the stations for a rapid few seconds, only to tear into the darkness again; light and dark, light and dark, the clap-and-screech rhythm of the subway. A group of Hispanic women all talking at once sit directly across from me, while a tall Hasidic Jew stands in the aisle. On my right sits an Indian woman in western dress. Her little boy, about five years old, plays between her knees. The man across from the empty seat laughs loudly to himself.
Speeding through this dark tunnel scares me. I look to the faces nearby. The women across the aisle talk and laugh; their throaty, maternal voices remind me of my friends in San Antonio. . . .These women on the subway do not know me, but I feel linked through the musical cadence of their voices. I also feel linked to the Hasidic Jew, someone called to read the Torah, to take the scroll out and dance with it. So many times I have approached the Christian altar to lift the gospel book and carry it down the aisle. My eyes stinging, I have often wanted to turn and then dance through the congregation with the book. Instead, I walk down the aisle very properly, reverently, but not reverently enough. Someday, I think, I’ll just dance.
When I see a prayer shawl, when I see a nun’s veil, when I hear a chapel bell ring for vespers, I think we will survive. Sometimes I imagine that the idea of the Lamed-Vov is true, that the world is held together by thirty-six hidden righteous people. Instead of gravity, devotion holds together the world for the rest of us who are rushing through our lives. Maybe this speeding subway car would explode into thousands of pieces if people in hidden places all over the world were not at prayer.
From “Downtown Express” in Grace’s Window by Suzanne Guthrie. Copyright © 1996, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com