Monday, February 23, 2015

Special Intentions and Lent

I miss many things about teaching high school girls. The 12 years I taught at Mother Guerin High School in Chicago brought joys and sorrows, easy days and challenging days, wonderfully inspiring colleagues, and the opportunity to teach and to learn from an amazing parade of young women. Those students enriched my life far more than they'll ever know, and I have tried to keep in contact with as many as I can, watching them blossom into teachers and mothers and lawyers and doctors and artists and performers and accountants and business owners and so much more. I thank God for every single one of them.

Of course, there was drama every day in classes full of girls. A lot of drama. Some of it manufactured by the nature of adolescence, some of it produced by situations in life outside school. Every day was different; every day carried the possibility of emotional turmoil.

I taught theology: church history, church doctrine, morality, social justice, and world history. Many aspects of my students' lives connected with the range of topics we would cover. Actually, as far as I was concerned, every aspect of their lives and mine connected with what we were studying. I frequently got to know a different side of my students' personalities precisely because we touched the essential, basic questions that every person asks herself or himself.

The first few minutes of class allowed each student to give a little hint of what was on her mind each day. We always began our classes with prayer and students took turns leading those prayers. While that student chose what to say in a more formal prayer, I would ask all her classmates, one by one, to tell us some particular thing they would like us to pray for. We called these "special intentions". If I had a prayer request, I would add mine, too. After each student had mentioned her intention (if she wanted to or had one), the prayer leader gathered all those up in the opening prayer.

I think that "special intentions" remain one of the most enduring memories of my former students. Some were more sincere and serious than others! (I have prayed for countless boyfriends over the years, with the result that I could probably still tell you names of long-since-dumped fellows.) Sometimes the girls would pray for one of their classmates with no specific reason given. If this happened repeatedly, I took it as a warning that something was going wrong in that student's life, and I looked for ways to help her. Students would ask for prayers for family members, which would give me clues that on-going worried or sad expressions might mean some serious news on the horizon. On the whole, I think "special intentions" gave each class deeper connections that helped us all to get through the days and weeks.

Teaching five or six classes each day meant that I paused for prayer every hour of the school day. I thought about this recently while gathering my spiritual resources and planning my Lenten observances. I prayed every hour of the school day. How have I missed the significance of that? Granted, these prayers were short and I certainly couldn't block out the distractions of managing a classroom full of teenage girls, but we prayed together and we lifted up our concerns together to God. Now that I'm no longer in the classroom, I certainly don't stop for prayer at the beginning of every hour. And I have only just realized how much I am missing.

So here is my Lenten plan. I am stopping to pray every hour during "working hours". (I have no excuse not to, because I don't have the outside distraction of work to hinder me!) I have a little list of my own "special intentions" that I want to lift up, and, as a connection to all those beloved students over the years, I am using Facebook to discover what joys and sorrows and challenges some of them are facing every day. I add specific intentions for them, too.

May I say that this has already proved a great blessing to me? I know that I am going to try to continue after Lent is over. There are so many "special intentions" needing an extra prayer.

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