Word: midnight
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Long Wait. Since then, Sir Anthony Eden has been waiting with impeccable good manners (and sometimes super-human patience) for Sir Winston Churchill to retire. The long wait has been a trial. Sometimes, in the midnight hours, Eden's phone would ring, and Churchill's voice would say: "I am very tired. I think you must get ready . . ." But in the morning the old man would change his mind again. Sometimes he got a puckish delight out of teasing Eden, and there have been times in recent months when Eden's respect for the "greatest living...
...midnight in Saigon. The windows of Freedom Palace were open, and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, in grey striped pajamas, was pacing his third-floor bedroom. Suddenly, through the sultry night, Diem heard the clatter of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. In the next instant, half a dozen mortar shells exploded beneath Ngo Dinh Diem's open window. "We never believed they would dare attack us!" said one of Diem's aides, aghast. But on Diem's shabby desk in Freedom Palace lay the confirmation: "All South Viet Nam will be put to blood...
Their rule is strict. They rise at midnight for Matins and Lauds, and rise again at 6 for Prime and Mass, and the day's routine. Meals are meager (no meat ever allowed). The sisters fast from Sept. 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross, until Easter Saturday. They maintain strict silence at all times, except for the evening's hour of recreation. (Every now and then, the chaplain at Sing Sing comes over from nearby Ossining and asks how "the lifers" are doing...
...great figures of the church, beginning with St. Paul, have combined both elements without conflict. "Laborare est orare," said St. Benedict (work is prayer). The Maryknoll sister hacking a kitchen garden out of the Bolivian jungle is living a prayer. And prayer is work. The cloistered contemplative rising at midnight to sing the psalms of the Divine Office is working for her fellow men-in Bolivia or The Bronx-whom she may never see. One prayer without the other would fall to the ground...
Even as the Security Council deliberated, a wedding was taking place in the village of Patish, one of the concrete settlements planted by the Israelis in the barren Negeb. It was midnight, and the wedding guests were still dancing outside the bridegroom's house. By the light of a glaring carbide lamp, the guests whirled and stomped to the wailing music of flute and cymbal. The watchdogs had been barking at the excitement all evening, and nobody noticed when they barked a little louder...