Hockey, Chutzpah, and Holiness

20 years ago my brother Dan went with our mom to try to find the place in Europe where her mom grew up.  They succeeded in finding her town, and shared a story that lives on in me though they are both gone.  And it shines a light on Advent as I reflect on this Sunday’s Advent-opening Gospel.

Rosina Luprich served as a watch nightly – and so did the other women in their town of Deutsch-Proben, midway between Vienna and Krakow, Poland during World War I.  With their men all conscripted in the war, the women patrolled the perimeter of the town with pots and pans through the night.  If enemy soldiers came into sight, they would start banging the pans to wake the mothers of the town, so that they could protect their children.  They walked the wall between safety and threat, and they watched.

The Gospel focuses on the word watch as a verb, calling us to remain alert.  But it also describes the four watches of the Roman system, three-hour divisions of the twelve-hour night, in the words “evening, midnight, cockcrow, or dawn.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, broke the 12 hours into three watches, and theologians liken them to childhood, adulthood, and old age. 

I found myself thinking about a line change in hockey, with five guys heading over the boards onto the bench as their replacement “line” of five come flying off the same bench onto the ice with fresh legs.  They do it so quickly because when the line changes, they are vulnerable, because the other team’s players stay on the ice, and stay in the flow without the chaos of change.

I looked around the room on Tuesday morning, I noticed the two generations of us, and I thought of the ages of man.  Half of us there are moving from child to man and half of us are transitioning from manhood to old age.   The chaos of change is within us, and all around in our society.  We’re called to watch as we are, from our own reality.  Rosina Luprich walked the hills around her town with pot and spoon, because that is who she was and what she had.  I realized as I look around the room that I’m in the chaos of line change in my own life.  I feel too young to me an old man, but too old to be a young man.  Maybe I feel the loss of my productive life as I go flying off the ice onto the bench, watching the fresh legs take the puck.  I wondered whether the young guys similarly feel the loss of the freedom of their recent adolescence, as they are called to the non-stop challenges of raising their own kids.

And I think about Rosina Luprich, who didn’t waste time with such mental games.  She just grabbed her pot and spoon and walked the wall and watched.  It would be ten years later, after my grandfather came back home from the war, that they would pack up their kids and immigrate to a farm near Chicago, a farm where my mother would grow up, where pots and spoons were for cooking, not for standing watch. 

Next: the ages of our lives