Kirkepiscatoid

That it may please thee to bless and keep all thy people,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Wow, this one is a shortie!

I got to thinking about the classic “Aaronic Blessing”:

May the LORD bless us and keep us;
May the LORD make his face to shine upon us, and be gracious to us;
May the LORD lift up the light of his countenance upon us, and grant us peace, this day, and always.
Amen.

In the original Hebrew, “baruch” (bless) literally means “to kneel.” “Shamar” (keep) means literally “to guard.” So in the original historical context, we are honoring God (figuratively “kneeling”), asking God to guard us, and that he illuminate the wholeness of his being within us, sending us into the world whole and complete.

It is funny...one of the times I very intensely feel the connections I’ve made with years of participating in Jewish activities with my retired friend M.J. is during the Aaronic Blessing. The other is during Lent, when the priest recites the Great Commandment at the beginning of the service. When we do that at Trinity, I mutter to myself, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai, Eloheinu, Adonai, Echad. Baruch shem kavod malkhuto le’olam va ed.” (I need to memorize the 2nd half.)

So I guess I’ll tell you an interesting story this week, where this “Jewish/Christian” overlap kind of fits.

One of the “odd things” I have fallen into as an “unpaid activity” is at times, I think at times I have filled in as the “Jewish chaplain” for the little handful of Jewish students, interns, and residents we have every year. This year, I have a very smart and put together student, D. She works hard at being as observant a Jew as she can be, 90 miles from the nearest synagogue

She came by the office to talk about the fact she was getting an excused absence to go home for Passover, and what she was going to need to study while she was gone, and about the lab she would have to make up. So she gets to talking about how she has just recently started in recent years to “sit back and feel” the Passover seder. When she lived closer to home, she was more worried about “getting things ready” with her mom. When she went to services when she lived closer to home, she was always one of the younger members of the congregation who “Got things ready for Rabbi.”

We had a really good chat about “learning to feel the presence of God” in a temple service, or a seder, and we kind of “compared notes” as to the “drama” of our respective liturgies. I said something like, “Well, when we bring the Gospel book down the aisle to read the Gospel, it would be for me like it would be for you when they take the Torah out of the Ark and hold it up and parade it around the temple...the word of God, going out among the people, like God among us.” Her eyes lit up and she goes, “YEAH! I know exactly what you mean! Some weeks it feels like God is RIGHT THERE.”

So I was telling her, “When you go home to Indiana for the seder, or go down to Columbia for services, just take some time to sit with it and feel it, now that you don’t have to worry about always getting things ready.”

Then she got to talking about how this year, despite being a busy medical student, trying to “honor her Sabbath better.” She knows she has to study, but she has been holding off on studying unless absolutely necessary from sundown Fri. to sundown Sat. She has been trying to only do “what’s necessary” on Saturdays, using the day more for relaxation, prayer and Torah/Talmud study. I told her how in recent months I have learned “quiet Saturdays” are important to me, more than I realized, so there was probably something in that. I was thinking, “Wow. She’s like 26 and she is so incredibly put together spiritually compared to when I was 26. I was still busy being a renegade.” Yet she sensed this trust in me that we could talk about these things from two different religious cultures.

She was talking about how hard it is to be a medical student and be a spiritually disciplined person. I told her that I was absolutely sure that she had as much to be gained from her spiritual disciplines, and to not think of them as two separate things but something that is “one thing” with these fitting together like puzzle pieces. I said, “The spiritual side of you can help you be a better medical student and eventually a better physician; the medical student side of you will spur you to study as vigorously as possible, because medical students are good at studying.”

So today, as I think about this blessing that is a key blessing in two religions, I am sort of in awe how the same things happen in the hearts of the practitioners of both brands of “spiritual discipline.”