Finding our Elis...

Written by Danielle Vaclavik
BCC Senior

The first reading we reflected on during the Busy Person’s Retreat was about Samuel, a student living in the temple and learning from the priest Eli.  He knew who God was supposed to be but did not know who God was personally because he lived in a time when signs from God were rare.  In the night, God called out to Samuel but when Samuel heard God, he thought it was Eli and went into Eli’s room.  Eli told him to go back to bed.  This happened three times before Eli realized what was happening.  He told Samuel the next time he heard the voice to respond “Speak, your servant is listening.” 

I started Sunday school in Kindergarten and attended all the way through Confirmation.  My mom took me to mass every weekend and to confession when I didn’t.  Like Samuel, I had been schooled in the ways of the church.  I knew who God was supposed to be, but like Samuel, we live in a world where messages from the Lord are rare and visions are quite uncommon.  For me, God was a hypothetical not a reality.

Like so many kids, college offered me the excuse and the freedom to walk away from church.  Soon Sundays were for sleeping in, not church.  For the next three years, I never regretted my decision to walk away.  I had everything I needed.  Looking back, God came to me so many times to offer me his hand.  He came through my family.  He came through my friends.  He came in the quiet of the night when I cried out wondering why I wasn’t happy when I had everything on my “checklist to success”.  He followed after me, calling my name, promising comfort and healing if I could just hear him.  But, I walked past him in the night, attributing those promises of comfort to other things.  Money. Boys. Drinking. Prestige. Yet, he did not give up.  God kept calling my name.

Last spring I studied abroad.  I arrived in Rome not knowing anyone.  I was scared but hopeful for the semester to come.  Never could I have imagined the plans God had in store for me.  God followed me to Rome.  Well actually, it would be more accurate to say he called to me all the way from Rome.  I arrived searching for the voice in my head.  I followed it all over Rome and half of Italy before it led me into a little chapel on Ash Wednesday, my first mass in over three years.  Here I met my Eli.

As my friends and I sat waiting for mass to start, a tall blonde deacon came over to ask us to help with the readings.  Flustered, I said “Yes”, while I internally thought, “I haven’t been in a church in three years and this guy wants me up on the alter?!”  Deacon Victor was an American seminary student in his last year before priesthood.  I didn’t know it at the time, but he and his good friend, Deacon Pat, would become stables in my everyday life from that day forward.  God, it seems, impatient for me to finally get the picture, had sent me not one but two Elis for my time in Rome. 

Through a chain of events that could truly have only been divine intervention, my roommate, Erica, and I agreed to attend Day 3 of the Lenten Station Churches with Victor and Pat the following day.  Station Mass is not the Stations of the Cross, but an ancient Roman tradition in which, during Lent, a mass is celebrated at a specific church each day.  Not just any 40 churches, but the same 40 churches every year since the Council of Trent.  Some of these churches were so old that they only celebrated this one mass a year.  After mass, we would look around and sometimes get to see tourist restricted areas like crypts and underground chapels. 

Without really knowing why, my roommate and I decided we would go to every 7am Station Mass we were in town for.  This was no easy commitment for a study abroad kid looking for a laid back semester in Europe.  So here I was getting up at 5am everyday to attend mass, totally out of my depth.  I clung to the little red history book they gave us detailing each church’s unique history.  I clung to it like a shield because being there for academic reasons was easier than being there for the right reasons.  Because even though I was going to mass with all these seminarians and nuns, I still felt silly.  I felt stupid for wanting to go.  I felt like a fake.

Mass was usually followed by a cappuccino and croissant at a café, which, as Lent and our friendships progressed, turned into two hour daily breakfasts where I learned about God from my Elis.  They were unknowingly preparing me, so that one morning, in some cathedral in Rome, in a sleep deprived haze, as I was going through the motions of mass, when God spoke quietly in my heart, I knew him.  My response was not as eloquent as Samuel’s.  I am ashamed to say it was more like a litany of angry accusations.  And you know what?  God laughed at me and then politely listed off all the moments in my life when he had come to me in the night and I had walked straight passed him to seek refuge elsewhere.  That day I started to pray, really pray.  It changed everything.  I would just kneel there talking to God…yelling at God…crying with God…simply listening to the silence, letting his voice in.  And it was wonderful.

Like Samuel, my Elis showed me how to hear God when he called my name.  The men and women I met in Rome changed my life.  They opened my eyes simply by being living examples of Jesus, being present in my life and including me in theirs.  I have learned, we all have Elis in our lives teaching us and preparing us to know and understand God.  They prepare us so, that when God calls out, we will be able to answer confidently; “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”