crossing over
Whenever I hear the sirens of an ambulance or firetruck, I always feel the urge to cross myself. Catholic-style.
I’m not Catholic. Trust me.
It goes back to when I lived in Dublin, Ireland. I spent a semester at school there, working a crappy job at Hard Rock Café to make a little extra pub-money. Each day, I took one of those double-decker buses into the heart of downtown always going immediately upstairs in hopes of finding a spot right by the front window. It made the trip seem like I was taking a spaceship, hovering just over the bumper-to-bumper traffic and making it possible to take in all the sights.
From time to time, the bus would have to scoot and wiggle its way as far toward the curb as possible on the narrow city streets to make room for a wailing ambulance to hustle on past. When this would happen, nearly every Irishman and woman on the bus would spontaneously cross themselves.
I took a road trip some time later with a friend of mine across the green quilt of somewhere-in-Ireland. While driving down a rainy road through a small town, a firetruck raced past, narrowly missing my friend’s car. He crossed himself before putting the car back in drive and continuing on.
“Why does everyone do that?” I asked, although the answer seemed obvious.
He looked at me, puzzled. “Do what, so?”
“Cross themselves when an emergency vehicle goes past?” I looked over my shoulder to see if the large truck had made it all the way down the narrow, stone-walled streets.
“Ah. Well, someone’s in trouble, right? Just a bit of a way to share a prayer of safe returns and may God take them, I suppose.”
Ever since then, I hear the sirens and I feel compelled to make the Sign of the Cross. Because it’s not a habit for me, I can never do it without thinking of the pneumonic someone shared with me once – “Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch…” and by then, the firetruck is on its way and I’m still fumbling to show a sign of respect, love and prayer.
I have yet to find any other way to send a prayer that I feel is truly working. But we all have ways of sending our love to exactly where it needs to go – whether it needs to go halfway around the world to a loved one on deployment, to your little ones on their first day all by themselves at school, or out to an entire nation of people in crisis that you’ve never even met. The simple nod of acknowledgement and honest sense of love is the most potent prayer ever uttered.
When I hear the sirens, I feel that it is not just me that is sending a prayer out to whoever needs it most – I feel that it is the practice of everyone I encountered on the buses in Ireland. If that is the case, then it is every single person in each of their lives that they’ve learned it from… and everyone they learned it from… until suddenly, my awkward fumble of symbolic prayer is charged with the collaborative prayer of more than just my humble self.
Next time you hear the sirens, try it. Send an anonymous prayer out and offer it up to whoever is in need of it. Notice how it makes you feel. And know that when you’re praying, I’m praying with you – and beyond that, so is the rest of the world.