We also have an enemy, determined beyond any other impulse or any other gain to achieve our ruin. His quarrel is not with us, primarily, but with the One who will not make way for Him, the One who saw him fall from heaven as lightning. As often happens in this kingdom, that mail has come to our address. The Court of the Women in King Xerxes’ palace in Susa was not a harem to Esther; it was a monastery. She was alone there with God. Perhaps one reason why Jehovah gets not one mention in this story is to give us a sense of what it was like for her. It was not only the Unspoken Name of God that could not be uttered, but she could not whisper Elohim or El Elyon or Jehovah Shammah or Jehovah Jireh or any of the names by which her people knew Him. It was “radio silence” in the palace.

Hebrew prayers exalt the Name of God, as do the Blessings over food and worship and work. Not for Esther. When she needed Him most, she might have felt Him most distant, but when we consider her faith and her faith in action, we know she did not abandon the truth she had known from her infancy. God is the God of Israel, the God of the families of Israel, even if that family is one exiled man and his orphaned cousin. Israel was God’s chosen people, and that reality had not been cast aside in Esther’s heart. We cannot know what temptations to doubt or despair might have come her way, but we can be sure that she did not give way to those foolish and fiendish fears that would have prompted Hegai to invest his preferences elsewhere.

Haman’s downfall, as was that of his puppet master, Satan, was his overweening need for prestige and promotion, to be seen as greatest and highest. Meanwhile, Esther was content to be unknown, to conceal her identity, to do as Mordecai asked, to trust and maintain a quiet hope. Life lessons abound inside Esther’s monastery for all of us here in Cor Unum, the monastery of the heart.

Convent Garden, Quito, Ecuador courtesy of Rodney Dodig