Rod Dreher's Blog, page 156

April 6, 2020

Woody Allen’s Frustrating Memoir

Last week I finished reading Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen’s new memoir. I hadn’t intended on buying it, but when Allen was cancelled by his cowardly publisher, under pressure from #MeToo fanatics, I felt obligated to buy the book when it was inevitably published by someone else. This I did, as a matter of solidarity with a cancelled writer, even though I lost interest in Woody Allen’s movies around the time he took up with Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow.


Like a lot of people, I thought Allen’s getting involved with Soon-Yi was gross, and it made me unsympathetic to him. He also lost his moviemaking flair, or so it seemed to me. When he stood accused of molesting his seven-year-old daughter Dylan, I knew that it had not been proven, but I kind of assumed it was true.


I really regret that now, having read this book, and its thorough, detailed representation of the case. Yes, I know, this is Woody Allen’s book, and he’s going to tell it from his side. But I find it very hard to believe that he did what Mia Farrow accuses him of doing. I believe that Woody Allen’s reputation has been seriously wronged. Some of the reviews — Dwight Garner’s in the Times, Monica Hesse’s childish rant in the Washington Post — were embarrassments, as if the reviewers were more concerned with signaling how disgusting they believe Allen is, so no one accuses them of going soft on a monster.


That said, this book is really uneven, and ultimately, a big disappointment.


It starts out wonderfully, in Allen’s Brooklyn childhood. He was born in 1935, and broke into comedy as an older teenager in the 1950s. I had forgotten how old Allen is, and how his early comedy experiences were with the old-school comics of the Milton Berle heyday. Reviewers have criticized Allen for sexist language in Apropos, e.g., referring to some Village girl he dated in the beatnik era as a “delectable bohemian kumquat.” I found it much more tolerable coming from an 84-year-old Jewish comedian who got his start in showbiz writing for Sid Caesar’s variety show. It’s antique, in a charming, period-piece way … for a while. By the last third of the book, when he tosses out the va-va-va-voom-y remarks about contemporary actresses with abandon, it sounds lecherous. It’s one thing to hear an elderly comedian wax the memories of his youthful kumquats; it’s another to listen to grandpa gas on about how “sexually radioactive” Scarlett Johansson is.


He does this a lot in commenting on the young actresses with whom he has worked over the past fifteen years or so. I don’t see anything wrong with noting the sex appeal of particular actors, but it’s really tasteless for a man of Woody Allen’s age to talk in this way. Again, I give a certain leeway for an older figure who was formed by the standards of a different era, but at some point, you have grow up. He’s the kind of guy who uses “birds” to describe the women of Swinging London, and you aren’t quite sure if he’s being ironic. In this book, it becomes a tic that’s not so much offensive as embarrassing.


Nevertheless, I loved all the stories of New York of the 1940s and 1950s, especially Allen’s tales of breaking into the comedy scene. The stories are colorful and a lot of fun, and Allen writes in his singular way of speaking that is always amusing and companionable. He is frequently self-deprecating, though by the end of the book, he does it so reflexively that it comes across as insincere. After he discharges his account of the Mia Farrow abuse accusations, Allen’s book loses forward motion. It reads like he wrote Apropos to say what he had to say about the most wounding and (understandably) infuriating episode of his entire life, and having done so, he lost interest in the plot. The last third of the book feels like it was written in haste, by someone who had a deadline to meet.


The great disappointment, at least to me, of this memoir is how shockingly unreflective the director is about his own work. The reader who comes to Apropos hoping to read Allen’s thoughts about what went into his best and most culturally significant movies, Annie Hall and Manhattan, will be let down. Allen spent a lot of time and effort trying to make Ingmar Bergman-style movies that are generally regarded as inferior. Why was he attracted to those themes? What was it about Bergman’s work that appealed to him? You don’t find out. Aside from superficial, chatty details about the making and marketing of these movies, the reader gets nothing. It’s weird if you think about it — that a prolific artist, one of the most influential tastemakers of the 20th century, publishing a memoir at the end of his life and career, declines to disclose significant insights into his own art, and the themes that inspired and tormented him.


In the book, Allen protests from time to time that he really isn’t intellectually deep at all. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but as someone who has watched a number of his movies, and genuinely cherish some of them, I find this hard to believe. So why is it?


Reading Allen write about how he doesn’t drink, and stayed away from drugs, made me wonder if he is genuinely afraid of losing control. He’s famously neurotic, and talks chipperly about his phobias, which have been a rich source of comedy for him over the decades. I can’t help thinking, after having finished this frustrating book, that Woody Allen is someone who is afraid to be vulnerable where he feels least secure: on matters of culture and intellect. Maybe Apropos of Nothing is a carefully controlled performance. But what, at this point, does Woody Allen have to lose? It seems more likely that he really doesn’t think deeply about matters of the intellect — which is not to say that he’s not intelligent.


My point is, maybe readers like me expect too much of Woody Allen. Thinking about this book, and why it was so dissatisfying, brought to mind an interview I did in the late 1990s with the actor John Hurt, who was in New York to promote a minor film of his (Love and Death on Long Island). For reasons I’ve now forgotten, I had been quite taken by the philosophical questions raised by the movie. Hurt’s performance as an aging academic who becomes infatuated with a shallow young male movie star was amazing. Hurt’s depiction of the disintegration of a distinguished intellectual’s personality in the grip of erotic obsession was enormously moving in its finely textured emotions. I prepared extensively for the interview. Hurt, I was sure, was a man who profoundly understood this character, and the intellectual themes — fear of death, the destructiveness of obsession, the hypnotic power of image, etc. — in the work.


Well, I made a fool of myself in that interview. Poor John Hurt struggled to answer my questions, and finally said, “I think you understand my character better than I do.” He was being kind. In fact, I had been an egghead about it. As a young film writer, I did not yet understand that actors and artists may not approach their work with a clear understanding of what they are doing. But they know what they are doing intuitively. John Hurt couldn’t articulate why his character did what he did, but he didn’t have to: he demonstrated onscreen how deeply he understood the character. I left the interview embarrassed by my rookie mistakes, and feeling bad that I seemed to have put the great actor in a bad position by posing questions that belonged in a film studies class, not in an interview. The thing is, I wouldn’t have put those questions to a regular movie star. Hurt’s performance was so bewitching that I assumed he could not have done it on intuition alone.


My point is that maybe Woody Allen is that kind of filmmaker. Maybe the idea that he’s a New York intellectual was just what we all wanted to believe. He tells us right here in his memoir that he’s not that deep. Maybe it’s true — or maybe he has spent his life too afraid to inquire into these questions beyond the Philosophy 101 level. When I was more into Woody Allen’s work, I used to wonder why he kept asking the same damn question about the meaning of life, and coming up with the same answer. Why didn’t he grow in his understanding? Now, having read his book, I think I know the answer, or at least I know that the answer is one of two things: he’s either shallow, or afraid. I don’t think Woody Allen is shallow.


One more thing: as sordid as the Soon-Yi affair was when it began, it sounds like she and Allen have had a loving marriage, and raised two adopted kids. Good for them.


UPDATE: Tanya Gold has a scathing review up this morning on UnHerd. Like me, she read the book out of solidarity with a cancelled writer. Like me, she was disappointed by it. Unlike me, she thought deeply about why, and I have to say that I think she pretty much gets what’s wrong with this book, and with Woody Allen. I found that the first third or so — with his stories about breaking into showbiz — compensated somewhat for the emptiness of the rest of the book (minus the Mia Farrow story) — but Gold, I concede, sees more deeply into the weakness of the book. Excerpt:


His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing.


Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.


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Published on April 06, 2020 06:55

April 5, 2020

Pandemic Diaries 20

Another Sunday under lockdown. No news to report. We said and sung the reader’s typika (pron. “TIPP-uh-kuh”) service together as a family. The reader’s typika is a prayer service used when there is no priest and liturgy available. Nora made pizza, with homemade crust and homemade pizza sauce. I took a mono nap, then went out onto the bak porch to read Serge Schmemann’s history of his family’s ancestral village in Russia, and sip on Dampney’s raspberry gin cordial, a small-batch concoction I brought back from the Hampshire (England) village where it’s made by the Dampney family. Matthew holed up in his room to study for his college classes. Julie graded papers to get ready for online school on Monday. And that was our day.


These days cooped up in the house are getting long. But who can complain, when one thinks of the days of men and women who work in hospitals? Here’s the best thing I saw all day. I hope it delights you as it delighted my family. Stick it out until Claire sings:



This is THE best thing shared over social media in the past 2 weeks. What a beautiful moment. Truly wonderful. Thank you to my new favourite duo. pic.twitter.com/8vzcWXrXOc


— terry kavanagh (@kipperkav) April 4, 2020



Here are your diary entries. The first is from Father Seraphim Bell, an American Orthodox priest (of ROCOR) locked down in Moscow. He sent this the other day, but I just got permission to share it with you:


(Today I received an email from my friend, Dn. Innocent in Kodiak, Alaska. He asked me how I was doing. That, as I wrote him, is not an easy question to answer for an introvert. But it did give me pause and an opportunity to evaluate my life at the moment. Here is some of what I wrote to him:)


Hello Dn. Innocent.


How am I? What a difficult question to answer. Especially for an introvert who probably thinks things over much too much. Today I am confined to the tiny apt, like most everyone else in Moscow. Everyone is supposed to stay home except for certain job categories, but everyone over 65 has been confined for a week already and we’re all supposed to remain inside for the entire month of April.


You would think this perfect conditions for a spiritual life. But that would only be true for a spiritual person, and I am still very unspiritual. And so I only profit a little from the isolation. I miss the services. I miss serving and communing at the altar very much.


I’m grateful for the internet. Because of it I’m able to stay in touch with family and friends. Because of it I was able to pray the canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Because of it I was able to pray the Akathist to St. Seraphim of Vyritsa today on his day (and mine). By way of the internet, Marilyn sends me the daily readings from the Synaxarion.


By the internet I’m able to continue language classes with our instructors. I’m also in daily contact with young Matushka Elizabeth, Liza, who is the daughter of a priest and the wife of a priest who lives across the street. She has helped to bring me food and medicine (I was hit with allergies a week ago and am still treating athletes foot). She has adopted me as her father figure since her own father is so far away and she can’t care for him. We are God’s gift to each other she says, and I would have to agree.


I can’t say I am happy about this confinement, but the reality is I am better off than so many other people. I was really happy to be here when I still had the freedom to go places and I was looking forward to visiting monasteries and churches. Maybe in a couple of months the opportunity will present itself to do those things. We have to wait and see what unfolds. As they say, only “today” is given to us.


I think life has always been unpredictable and “unexpected” but it is only in times of crisis that we see it so clearly. Only in such times do I realize that my life is not in my own hands and my own will, though even in such times my worldly flesh rebels against that idea. (But in such times as these, I’m much more aware that though a man makes his plans, “God directs his steps.”)


The isolation causes me to live one day at a time. I have always been a visionary, a dreamer, and so lived, in my mind, in the future. I can’t do that so easily anymore. So I’m learning to live in the moment and for the day. . .


As I mentioned earlier, today is the feast of St. Seraphim of Vyritsa, my name’s day or as they say here in Russia, День Ангела, Angel’s day. Fr. Ioan, the rector of the nearby church in which I was serving, surprised me today. My cell phone rang and a voice asked me to open the hall door leading to the apartment. I thought it was Fr. Demetri, but when I opened the door, there stood Fr. Ioan in cassock and face mask. He was carrying 3 large bags of food and brought them into the apt.


He smiled, gave me a hug and congratulated me on my День Ангела. And then he was off to help others. His short visit filled me with joy. For just a moment I felt reconnected to “my church.” I’m sure it will not be soon, but I long to return there to the altar and serve once again. In the meantime, God has given me all I need for my salvation here in my urban monastic cell. The challenge is to make good use of it!



 


From Tacoma, Washington:



I am a part-time controller/administrator for a law firm.  My work hours actually went from part-time to double full-time as I attempted to prepare people to work remotely that had never worked remotely.  I assume some risk, along with the accounting manager, in going into the office once a week to make sure deposits are made and that business continues.  We have a bankruptcy division that I am thinking will soon be overwhelmed with work.  We also have an estate planning division that is even more busy right now since hospitals and clinics are telling doctors to make sure they and their staff have their estate planning documents in order.  But we also have people whose line of work will decline.  What will be the impact for those attorneys and their staff who work in areas of law deeply affected by the decline?  There is much uncertainty at the moment.  We are still planning a major office move to a new building in December.  Will the construction companies be able to complete their work?  Questions, questions, questions.


The office has kept in contact using Microsoft Teams, which I now see as the ultimate in social distancing.  I question how the cohesion of groups will continue using video conferencing.  Our church, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, is using these methods and we are planning to have Pascha dinner with our friends using Zoom.  As an Orthodox Christian, the physical presence of reality is so important.  To celebrate as a community using teleconferencing seems so foreign and disordered.  Will it become part of who we are? Permanently? Our Church is now questioning whether to have the Greek Festival this fall.  It will probably not happen.


Rod, about the time that you were becoming Orthodox, my family too became Orthodox.  In 2003 I was encouraged by an atheist friend, of all people, to go to the Greek Festival since I enjoyed culture and was religious.  I took the family and missed the lecture on iconography.  I was disappointed and mentioned to a deacon wearing a cassock that I missed the lecture.  He said, “Why don’t you come on Wednesday night.  They are giving the lecture then.”  So, I went on Wednesday night not realizing I had signed up for a catechumen class!  The priest’s first introduction was so stimulating and fulfilling that I continued to come back to class week after week.  The priest encouraged me to question and I fired off tons of questions.


I was brought up in the Christian Church, attended a Baptist Church in college, and married a Methodist and became a Methodist knowing the uphill battle I had against the liberalism in that denomination.  My wife was the Church pianist at the Church she attended from birth to college.  We were married in her Church.  One Easter I pulled up to the Church and saw a rainbow banner draped around the cross.  That was the final straw and I left with the children.   Anyway, I attending the Orthodox catechism.  But I would not join without my wife.  She attended catechism a year later.  After two years of instruction, I and my wife and the two girls were all chrismated.   The story goes longer and deeper, but suffice it to say by a miracle we live within walking distance of Church, I live within walking distance of work too, and we live right next door to our dear Greek friends and very close to other friends.  We all attend Church together and I have struggled in some ways to create the Benedict Option lifestyle you recommend.  With work and Church services and life in general, I have not always fulfilled the requirements necessary to meet the balanced life goal of the Benedict Option that enables us to carry on.  I know from your posts that you have struggled with reaching this goal too.  I have a health condition similar to you that can make me feel physically tired.  It impacts my prayer life, but I also recognize that I am overcome with distractions from my own passions.  I am way to interested in current events and the news and documentaries now available on YouTube.  Prayer time should not be sacrificed during these times.  Prayer is the counterweight that allows us to be faithful and productive.  Perhaps this time of quarantine can be used effectively to recommit ourselves to the Lord and to recommit ourselves to our family and friends we so dearly love.



 


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Published on April 05, 2020 20:18

‘Keep Christianity Weird’ Sunday

Today is the Sunday in the Orthodox liturgical year when we commemorate St. Mary of Egypt, an extraordinary ascetical penitent of fifth century Palestine. If you’ve never heard of her, don’t worry — I didn’t know a thing about her until I became Orthodox. But she is so beloved in the Eastern church that the second Sunday before Pascha (Easter) is devoted to her. She is revered for her repentance.


I’m going to post below her Life, which is read aloud in every Orthodox church on this Sunday. It was written down in the form we use today by St. Sophronius, who was patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 to 638, though the events it recalls took place early in the fifth century. This version is the one we read in the Orthodox Church in America (see here for the webpage).


Last week, a reader wrote me to say that she had been raised fundamentalist, but left Christianity altogether as a young adult. She lost her faith entirely, but lately, in this pandemic crisis, she has felt the call back. She said that the only thing she learned about other forms of Christianity came through her own church tradition explaining what was wrong with them. She said she knows very little of pre-Protestant Christianity, and said that the fundamentalist sect of her childhood pretty much taught that the early church was exactly like them.


I shared with her the story about how my own return to Christianity as an adult began when I discovered that the breadth and depth of Christianity was much, much greater than I had imagined, growing up in small-town America in the late twentieth century. As a Catholic, I learned a lot about medieval Christianity, and fell in love with it. As an Orthodox Christian, the world of faith expanded to include not only Byzantine and Russian Christianity, but also the patristic era. (Though Catholicism also takes in the patristic era, and reveres its saints, Orthodoxy does so in a more emphatic way.) For me as a modern person, the sheer weirdness of Orthodoxy is one of its great strengths. There are few stories more illustrative of that than the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. It’s a story of a wild woman — wild in her worldliness, and then wild in holiness. There is the seaminess of a Mediterranean port town, there is whoring, there is nakedness … and there is salvation, and extreme penitence, and the making of an Egyptian saint whose life and name is celebrated in all the Orthodox churches of the world on this day (N.B., she is also a Catholic saint).


This is what Christianity was in the faith’s ancient past. None of us live like St. Mary of Egypt today, but she is part of the communion of saints, and therefore her story is also the story of all who believe in Jesus Christ. If your Christian faith cannot make room for a wild woman like St. Mary of Egypt, it is too narrow.


Here is her glorious tale. Notice, by the way, that the habit of the monks of the Holy Land in this period was to spend their Great Lent out in the desert, fasting from the Eucharist the entire time — something that many of us have been forced to do in this desert of covid-19. Keep in mind too that Mother Mary was 76 years old when Abba Zosima met her in the Jordanian desert:


Saint Zosimas (April 4) was a monk at a certain Palestinian monastery on the outskirts of Caesarea. Having dwelt at the monastery since his childhood, he lived there in asceticism until he reached the age of fifty-three. Then he was disturbed by the thought that he had attained perfection, and needed no one to instruct him. “Is there a monk anywhere who can show me some form of asceticism that I have not attained? Is there anyone who has surpassed me in spiritual sobriety and deeds?”


Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Zosimas, you have struggled valiantly, as far as this is in the power of man. However, there is no one who is righteous (Rom 3:10). So that you may know how many other ways lead to salvation, leave your native land, like Abraham from the house of his father (Gen 12:1), and go to the monastery by the Jordan.”


Abba Zosimas immediately left the monastery, and following the angel, he went to the Jordan monastery and settled in it.


Here he met Elders who were adept in contemplation, and also in their struggles. Never did anyone utter an idle word. Instead, they sang constantly, and prayed all night long. Abba Zosimas began to imitate the spiritual activity of the holy monks.


Thus much time passed, and the holy Forty Day Fast approached. There was a certain custom at the monastery, which was why God had led Saint Zosimas there. On the First Sunday of Great Lent the igumen [abbot] served the Divine Liturgy, everyone received the All-Pure Body and Blood of Christ. Afterwards, they went to the trapeza [refectory] for a small repast, and then assembled once more in church.


The monks prayed and made prostrations, asking forgiveness one of another. Then they made a prostration before the igumen and asked his blessing for the struggle that lay before them. During the Psalm “The Lord is my Light and my Savior, whom shall I fear? The Lord is defender of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps 26/27:1), they opened the monastery gate and went off into the wilderness.


Each took with him as much food as he needed, and went into the desert. When their food ran out, they ate roots and desert plants. The monks crossed the Jordan and scattered in various directions, so that no one might see how another fasted or how they spent their time.


The monks returned to the monastery on Palm Sunday, each having his own conscience as a witness of his ascetic struggles. It was a rule of the monastery that no one asked how anyone else had toiled in the desert.


Abba Zosimas, according to the custom of the monastery, went deep into the desert hoping to find someone living there who could benefit him.


He walked into the wilderness for twenty days and then, when he sang the Psalms of the Sixth Hour and made the usual prayers. Suddenly, to the right of the hill where he stood, he saw a human form. He was afraid, thinking that it might be a demonic apparition. Then he guarded himself with the Sign of the Cross, which removed his fear. He turned to the right and saw a form walking southward. The body was black from the blazing sunlight, and the faded short hair was white like a sheep’s fleece. Abba Zosimas rejoiced, since he had not seen any living thing for many days.


The desert-dweller saw Zosimas approaching, and attempted to flee from him. Abba Zosimas, forgetting his age and fatigue, quickened his pace. When he was close enough to be heard, he called out, “Why do you flee from me, a sinful old man? Wait for me, for the love of God.”


The stranger said to him, “Forgive me, Abba Zosimas, but I cannot turn and show my face to you. I am a woman, and as you see, I am naked. If you would grant the request of a sinful woman, throw me your cloak so I might cover my body, and then I can ask for your blessing.”


Then Abba Zosimas was terrified, realizing that she could not have called him by name unless she possessed spiritual insight.


Covered by the cloak, the ascetic turned to Zosimas: “Why do you want to speak with me, a sinful woman? What did you wish to learn from me, you who have not shrunk from such great labors?”


Abba Zosimas fell to the ground and asked for her blessing. She also bowed down before him, and for a long time they remained on the ground each asking the other to bless. Finally, the woman ascetic said: “Abba Zosimas, you must bless and pray, since you are honored with the grace of the priesthood. For many years you have stood before the holy altar, offering the Holy Gifts to the Lord.”


These words frightened Saint Zosimas even more. With tears he said to her, “O Mother! It is clear that you live with God and are dead to this world. You have called me by name and recognized me as a priest, though you have never seen me before. The grace granted you is apparent, therefore bless me, for the Lord’s sake.”


Yielding finally to his entreaties, she said, “Blessed is God, Who cares for the salvation of men.” Abba Zosimas replied, “Amen.” Then they rose to their feet. The woman ascetic again said to the Elder, “Why have you come, Father, to me who am a sinner, bereft of every virtue? Apparently, the grace of the Holy Spirit has brought you to do me a service. But tell me first, Abba, how do the Christians live, how is the Church guided?”


Abba Zosimas answered her, “By your holy prayers God has granted the Church and us all a lasting peace. But fulfill my unworthy request, Mother, and pray for the whole world and for me a sinner, that my wanderings in the desert may not be useless.”


The holy ascetic replied, “You, Abba Zosimas, as a priest, ought to pray for me and for all, for you are called to do this. However, since we must be obedient, I will do as you ask.”


The saint turned toward the East, and raising her eyes to heaven and stretching out her hands, she began to pray in a whisper. She prayed so softly that Abba Zosimas could not hear her words. After a long time, the Elder looked up and saw her standing in the air more than a foot above the ground. Seeing this, Zosimas threw himself down on the ground, weeping and repeating, “Lord, have mercy!”


Then he was tempted by a thought. He wondered if she might not be a spirit, and if her prayer could be insincere. At that moment she turned around, lifted him from the ground and said, “Why do your thoughts confuse you, Abba Zosimas? I am not an apparition. I am a sinful and unworthy woman, though I am guarded by holy Baptism.”


Then she made the Sign of the Cross and said, “May God protect us from the Evil One and his schemes, for fierce is his struggle against us.” Seeing and hearing this, the Elder fell at her feet with tears saying, “I beseech you by Christ our God, do not conceal from me who you are and how you came into this desert. Tell me everything, so that the wondrous works of God may be revealed.”


She replied, “It distresses me, Father, to speak to you about my shameless life. When you hear my story, you might flee from me, as if from a poisonous snake. But I shall tell you everything, Father, concealing nothing. However, I exhort you, cease not to pray for me a sinner, that I may find mercy on the Day of Judgment.


“I was born in Egypt and when I was twelve years old, I left my parents and went to Alexandria. There I lost my chastity and gave myself to unrestrained and insatiable sensuality. For more than seventeen years I lived like that and I did it all for free. Do not think that I refused the money because I was rich. I lived in poverty and worked at spinning flax. To me, life consisted in the satisfaction of my fleshly lust.


“One summer I saw a crowd of people from Libya and Egypt heading toward the sea. They were on their way to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. I also wanted to sail with them. Since I had no food or money, I offered my body in payment for my passage. And so I embarked on the ship.


“Now, Father, believe me, I am very amazed, that the sea tolerated my wantonness and fornication, that the earth did not open up its mouth and take me down alive into hell, because I had ensnared so many souls. I think that God was seeking my repentance. He did not desire the death of a sinner, but awaited my conversion.


“So I arrived in Jerusalem and spent all the days before the Feast living the same sort of life, and maybe even worse.


“When the holy Feast of the Exaltation of the Venerable Cross of the Lord arrived, I went about as before, looking for young men. At daybreak I saw that everyone was heading to the church, so I went along with the rest. When the hour of the Holy Elevation drew nigh, I was trying to enter into the church with all the people. With great effort I came almost to the doors, and attempted to squeeze inside. Although I stepped up to the threshold, it was as though some force held me back, preventing me from entering. I was brushed aside by the crowd, and found myself standing alone on the porch. I thought that perhaps this happened because of my womanly weakness. I worked my way into the crowd, and again I attempted to elbow people aside. However hard I tried, I could not enter. Just as my feet touched the church threshold, I was stopped. Others entered the church without difficulty, while I alone was not allowed in. This happened three or four times. Finally my strength was exhausted. I went off and stood in a corner of the church portico.


“Then I realized that it was my sins that prevented me from seeing the Life-Creating Wood. The grace of the Lord then touched my heart. I wept and lamented, and I began to beat my breast. Sighing from the depths of my heart, I saw above me an icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. Turning to Her, I prayed: ‘O Lady Virgin, who gave birth in the flesh to God the Word! I know that I am unworthy to look upon your icon. I rightly inspire hatred and disgust before your purity, but I know also that God became Man in order to call sinners to repentance. Help me, O All-Pure One. Let me enter the church. Allow me to behold the Wood upon which the Lord was crucified in the flesh, shedding His Blood for the redemption of sinners, and also for me. Be my witness before Your Son that I will never defile my body again with the impurity of fornication. As soon as I have seen the Cross of your Son, I will renounce the world, and go wherever you lead me.’


“After I had spoken, I felt confidence in the compassion of the Mother of God, and left the spot where I had been praying. I joined those entering the church, and no one pushed me back or prevented me from entering. I went on in fear and trembling, and entered the holy place.


“Thus I also saw the Mysteries of God, and how God accepts the penitent. I fell to the holy ground and kissed it. Then I hastened again to stand before the icon of the Mother of God, where I had given my vow. Bending my knees before the Virgin Theotokos, I prayed:


‘O Lady, you have not rejected my prayer as unworthy. Glory be to God, Who accepts the repentance of sinners. It is time for me to fulfill my vow, which you witnessed. Therefore, O Lady, guide me on the path of repentance.’


“Then I heard a voice from on high: ‘If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest.’


“I immediately believed that this voice was meant for me, and I cried out to the Mother of God: ‘O Lady, do not forsake me!’


“Then I left the church portico and started on my journey. A certain man gave me three coins as I was leaving the church. With them I bought three loaves of bread, and asked the bread merchant the way to the Jordan.


“It was nine o’clock when I saw the Cross. At sunset I reached the church of Saint John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan. After praying in the church, I went down to the Jordan and washed my face and hands in its water. Then in this same temple of Saint John the Forerunner I received the Life-Creating Mysteries of Christ. Then I ate half of one of my loaves of bread, drank water from the holy Jordan, and slept there that night on the ground. In the morning I found a small boat and crossed the river to the opposite shore. Again I prayed that the Mother of God would lead me where She wished. Then I found myself in this desert.”


Abba Zosimas asked her, “How many years have passed since you began to live in the desert?”


“‘I think,” she replied, “it is forty-seven years since I came from the Holy City.”


Abba Zosimas again asked, “What food do you find here, Mother?”


And she said, “I had with me two and a half loaves of bread when I crossed the Jordan. Soon they dried out and hardened. Eating a little at a time, I finished them after a few years.”


Again Abba Zosimas asked, “Is it possible you have survived for so many years without sickness, and without suffering in any way from such a complete change?”


“Believe me, Abba Zosimas,” the woman said, “I spent seventeen years in this wilderness [after she had spent seventeen years in immorality], fighting wild beasts: mad desires and passions. When I began to eat bread, I thought of the meat and fish which I had in abundance in Egypt. I also missed the wine that I loved so much when I was in the world, while here I did not even have water. I suffered from thirst and hunger. I also had a mad desire for lewd songs. I seemed to hear them, disturbing my heart and my hearing. Weeping and striking myself on the breast, I remembered the vow I had made. At last I beheld a radiant Light shining on me from everywhere. After a violent tempest, a lasting calm ensued.


“Abba, how shall I tell you of the thoughts that urged me on to fornication? A fire seemed to burn within me, awakening in me the desire for embraces. Then I would throw myself to the ground and water it with my tears. I seemed to see the Most Holy Virgin before me, and She seemed to threaten me for not keeping my vow. I lay face downward day and night upon the ground, and would not get up until that blessed Light encircled me, dispelling the evil thoughts that troubled me.


“Thus I lived in this wilderness for the first seventeen years. Darkness after darkness, misery after misery stood about me, a sinner. But from that time until now the Mother of God helps me in everything.”


Abba Zosimas again inquired, “How is it that you require neither food, nor clothing?”


She answered, “After finishing my bread, I lived on herbs and the things one finds in the desert. The clothes I had when I crossed over the Jordan became torn and fell apart. I suffered both from the summer heat, when the blazing heat fell upon me, and from the winter cold, when I shivered from the frost. Many times I fell down upon the earth, as though dead. I struggled with various afflictions and temptations. But from that time until the present day, the power of God has guarded my sinful soul and humble body. I was fed and clothed by the all-powerful word of God, since man does not live by bread alone, but by every word proceeding from the mouth of God (Dt 8:3, Mt.4:4, Luke 4:4), and those who have put off the old man (Col 3:9) have no refuge, hiding themselves in the clefts of the rocks (Job 24:8, Heb 11:38). When I remember from what evil and from what sins the Lord delivered me, I have imperishible food for salvation.”


When Abba Zosimas heard that the holy ascetic quoted the Holy Scripture from memory, from the Books of Moses and Job and from the Psalms of David, he then asked the woman, “Mother, have you read the Psalms and other books?”


She smiled at hearing this question, and answered, “Believe me, I have seen no human face but yours from the time that I crossed over the Jordan. I never learned from books. I have never heard anyone read or sing from them. Perhaps the Word of God, which is alive and acting, teaches man knowledge by itself (Col 3:16, 1 Thess 2:13). This is the end of my story. As I asked when I began, I beg you for the sake of the Incarnate Word of God, holy Abba, pray for me, a sinner.


“Furthermore, I beg you, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, tell no one what you have heard from me, until God takes me from this earth. Next year, during Great Lent, do not cross the Jordan, as is the custom of your monastery.”


Again Abba Zosimas was amazed, that the practice of his monastery was known to the holy woman ascetic, although he had not said anything to her about this.


“Remain at the monastery,” the woman continued. “Even if you try to leave the monastery, you will not be able to do so. On Great and Holy Thursday, the day of the Lord’s Last Supper, place the Life-Creating Body and Blood of Christ our God in a holy vessel, and bring it to me. Await me on this side of the Jordan, at the edge of the desert, so that I may receive the Holy Mysteries. And say to Abba John, the igumen of your community, ‘Look to yourself and your brothers (1 Tim 4:16), for there is much that needs correction.’ Do not say this to him now, but when the Lord shall indicate.”


Asking for his prayers, the woman turned and vanished into the depths of the desert.


For a whole year Elder Zosimas remained silent, not daring to reveal to anyone what he had seen, and he prayed that the Lord would grant him to see the holy ascetic once more.


When the first week of Great Lent came again, Saint Zosimas was obliged to remain at the monastery because of sickness. Then he remembered the woman’s prophetic words that he would not be able to leave the monastery. After several days went by, Saint Zosimas was healed of his infirmity, but he remained at the monastery until Holy Week.


On Holy Thursday, Abba Zosimas did what he had been ordered to do. He placed some of the Body and Blood of Christ into a chalice, and some food in a small basket. Then he left the monastery and went to the Jordan and waited for the ascetic. The saint seemed tardy, and Abba Zosimas prayed that God would permit him to see the holy woman.


Finally, he saw her standing on the far side of the river. Rejoicing, Saint Zosimas got up and glorified God. Then he wondered how she could cross the Jordan without a boat. She made the Sign of the Cross over the water, then she walked on the water and crossed the Jordan. Abba Zosimas saw her in the moonlight, walking toward him. When the Elder wanted to make prostration before her, she forbade him, crying out, “What are you doing, Abba? You are a priest and you carry the Holy Mysteries of God.”


Reaching the shore, she said to Abba Zosimas, “Bless me, Father.” He answered her with trembling, astonished at what he had seen. “Truly God did not lie when he promised that those who purify themselves will be like Him. Glory to You, O Christ our God, for showing me through your holy servant, how far I am from perfection.”


The woman asked him to recite both the Creed and the “Our Father.” When the prayers were finished, she partook of the Holy Mysteries of Christ. Then she raised her hands to the heavens and said, “Lord, now let Your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen Your salvation.”


The saint turned to the Elder and said, “Please, Abba, fulfill another request. Go now to your monastery, and in a year’s time come to the place where we first time spoke.”


He said, “If only it were possible for me to follow you and always see your holy face!”


She replied, “For the Lord’s sake, pray for me and remember my wretchedness.”


Again she made the Sign of the Cross over the Jordan, and walked over the water as before, and disappeared into the desert. Zosimas returned to the monastery with joy and terror, reproaching himself because he had not asked the saint’s name. He hoped to do so the following year.


A year passed, and Abba Zosimas went into the desert. He reached the place where he first saw the holy woman ascetic. She lay dead, with arms folded on her bosom, and her face was turned to the east. Abba Zosimas washed her feet with his tears and kissed them, not daring to touch anything else. For a long while he wept over her and sang the customary Psalms, and said the funeral prayers. He began to wonder whether the saint would want him to bury her or not. Hardly had he thought this, when he saw something written on the ground near her head: “Abba Zosimas, bury on this spot the body of humble Mary. Return to dust what is dust. Pray to the Lord for me. I reposed on the first day of April, on the very night of the saving Passion of Christ, after partaking of the Mystical Supper.”


Reading this note, Abba Zosimas was glad to learn her name. He then realized that Saint Mary, after receiving the Holy Mysteries from his hand, was transported instantaneously to the place where she died, though it had taken him twenty days to travel that distance.


Glorifying God, Abba Zosimas said to himself, “It is time to do what she asks. But how can I dig a grave, with nothing in my hands?” Then he saw a small piece of wood left by some traveler. He picked it up and began to dig. The ground was hard and dry, and he could not dig it. Looking up, Abba Zosimas saw an enormous lion standing by the saint’s body and licking her feet. Fear gripped the Elder, but he guarded himself with the Sign of the Cross, believing that he would remain unharmed through the prayers of the holy woman ascetic. Then the lion came close to the Elder, showing its friendliness with every movement. Abba Zosimas commanded the lion to dig the grave, in order to bury Saint Mary’s body. At his words, the lion dug a hole deep enough to bury the body. Then each went his own way. The lion went into the desert, and Abba Zosimas returned to the monastery, blessing and praising Christ our God.


Arriving at the monastery, Abba Zosimas related to the monks and the igumen, what he had seen and heard from Saint Mary. All were astonished, hearing about the miracles of God. They always remembered Saint Mary with faith and love on the day of her repose.


Abba John, the igumen of the monastery, heeded the words of Saint Mary, and with the help of God corrected the things that were wrong at the monastery. Abba Zosimas lived a God-pleasing life at the monastery, reaching nearly a hundred years of age. There he finished his temporal life, and passed into life eternal.


The monks passed on the life of Saint Mary of Egypt by word of mouth without writing it down.


“I however,” says Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem (March 11), “wrote down the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt as I heard it from the holy Fathers. I have recorded everything, putting the truth above all else.”


“May God, Who works great miracles and bestows gifts on all who turn to Him in faith, reward those who hear or read this account, and those who copy it. May he grant them a blessed portion together with Saint Mary of Egypt and with all the saints who have pleased God by their pious thoughts and works. Let us give glory to God, the Eternal King, that we may find mercy on the Day of Judgment through our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom is due all glory, honor, majesty and worship together with the Unoriginate Father, and the Most Holy and Life-Creating Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.”


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Published on April 05, 2020 16:43

Holy Week In Plague Time

Today is Palm Sunday for most US Christians (we Orthodox are a week behind you this year). Look:


Dr. Jerome M. Adams, the surgeon general, said on Sunday that the intensifying outbreak was expected to test the country’s “resolve” over the next week and called for governors of states who had not yet issued stay-at-home orders to put in place any restrictions they could.


“The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment,” Dr. Adams said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s going to be our 9/11 moment. It’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives.”


The symbolism is heavy here.


Read this NYT account by a physician explaining what it’s like to be on a ventilator, and what it does to your body. Protecting us from this — and, obviously, death — is what all this quarantining is for. Protecting the community from the spread of death is what it is for. Protecting us from the drawn-out experience of economic destruction is what it’s for (that is, we can have short, sharp destruction, or drag it out over a longer period of time … but it’s unavoidable).


I find myself in total sympathy with fellow Christians who mourn what we have lost, in terms of having to miss church, especially in this holiest of seasons. But I also find myself sore at those who are meeting this crisis by stoking the fires of anger at state and religious authorities for telling them not to go to church. I know I’ve been harping on this, but man, it’s such a beatdown to read online how harshly some Christians are reacting.


I was feeling a bit sorry for myself this morning, the first morning that we haven’t been able to watch livestreaming liturgy from our own parish. Our priest and a skeleton crew of altar servers and choir members had been offering the liturgy under previous guidelines from the bishop. But last week, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America sent down new guidelines. Under them, a priest who has been in contact with someone who works in a hospital where covid patients are cannot serve the liturgy with others. In our case, our priest happens to be married to a physician’s assistant. So, no local liturgy, until further notice. But consider: every morning, our priest has to say goodbye to his wife as she goes to the front lines of this death-dealing battle. And every night, he has to welcome her back into their home, with their little girl, not knowing if she is carrying the virus. And she has to do this every day too, not knowing if this will be the day she gets the virus that might leave her daughter motherless and her husband a widower … or if she will bring the virus to them.


And the main thing the priest was put on this earth to do — say the liturgy, and pastor his flock — he cannot do, because of this virus.


The pressure on that clergy family must be enormous. Considering that, I find it hard to pity myself in my own loss. Believe me, I do … but when I start to welcome that spirit of self-pity into my mind, I chase it out. There is no way I  or anybody else is going to do what is required of us if we feel sorry for ourselves, or nurture within our hearts a feeling of spite towards bishops, pastors, and civil authorities. That can bring nothing but evil. We are all being asked to take an unusual share in Christ’s Passion this year. Even so, what a soft road to Golgotha this is for most of us: just staying at home! I feel sometimes like we are the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night in which Jesus was betrayed: we can’t even stay awake to wait with him. We want to sleep when we want to, and not to have our rhythms disturbed.


Or we are like Peter, when he brandishes his sword and cuts the ear off the high priest’s servant accompanying the soldiers who arrested Jesus. Peter’s act was humanly comprehensible — but he was not fulfilling the will of his Lord. The more difficult struggle for Peter was sheathing his sword and allowing what had to happen, to happen. The greater struggle for Peter was the inner struggle to stand still and abide with Him. So it is with us.


The Christians who think they are being bold for the Gospel by going to church, against the orders of civil authorities, are behaving, in a way like angry Peter. What they are doing, without intending to, is bringing pain and suffering onto others, though they think they are serving Christ. It is self-righteous.


I find Christian self-righteousness and self-pity — which are closely connected — hard to take. Why? It’s because of having spent so much of the past year immersed in the experiences of Christians under Soviet-bloc communism. The sacrifices we American Christians are being asked to make at this time are nothing compared to what circumstances imposed on believers under the communist yoke. For whatever mysterious reason, God is putting us to the test right now, and so many of us are failing it. True, I have disciplined myself not to complain about having no church services right now, but I have not disciplined myself to compensate for it by doing more prayer, more spiritual reading, and so forth — even though, confined in the house, I have the time. In other words, I have stirred myself enough to tell Peter to put his sword away, but I am still asleep when Jesus asks me to be fully awake, and waiting.


I want to share with you all a letter that the Orthodox priest Father Stephen Freeman put on his blog, and that a reader sent to me. It’s a 1928 letter written on Easter (Pascha) from a Russian prisoner, suffering in a Bolshevik jail, to his exiled uncle living in Paris. The author is a relative of the well-known Russian-American priest Father Alexander Schmemann, and is recalled in the book his son Serge, a former New York Times correspondent, wrote about his family’s ancestral village in Russia, Sergiyevskoye. The book is Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village. It is available on Kindle for $4.99; based on the letter you are about to read, and Father Stephen’s enthusiastic recommendation, I bought the electronic version, and will read it today.


Anyway, read this letter, and carry it in your heart into Holy Week:


30 March/ 12 April 1928


Dear Uncle Grishanchik,


I greet you and Aunt Masha with the impending Holy Day, and I wish you all the very best. For a long, long time I have wanted to write to you, dear Uncle Grishanchik; you always showed such concern for me, you helped me so generously in a difficult moment of my life, and, mainly, your entire image is so inseparably linked for each of us, your nephews, with such wonderful memories; you always are, were, and will be our dearest, most beloved uncle.


I am approaching the fourth Easter that I will spend behind these walls, separated from my family, but the feelings for these holy days which were infused in me from earliest childhood do not fail me now; from the beginning of Holy Week I have felt the approach of the Feast, I follow the life of the Church, I repeat to myself the hymns of the Holy Week services, and in my soul there arise those feelings of tender reverence that I used to feel as a child going to confession or communion. At 35 those feelings are as strong and as deep as in those childhood years.


My dear Uncle Grishanchik, going over past Easters in my memory, I remember our last Easter at Sergiyevskoye, which we spent with you and Aunt Masha, and I felt the immediate need to write you. If you have not forgotten, Easter in 1918 was rather late, and spring was early and very warm, so when in the last weeks of Lent I had to take Aunt Masha to Ferzikovo, the roads were impassable. I remember that trip as now; it was a warm, heavy, and humid day, which consumed the last snow in the forests and gullies faster than the hottest sun; wherever you looked, water, water, and more water, and all the sounds seemed to rise from it, from the burbling and rushing of the streams on all sides to the ceaseless ring of countless larks. We had to go by sleigh – not on the road, which wound through the half-naked fields in a single muddy ridge, but alongside, carefully choosing the route. Each hoofprint, each track left by the runners, immediately turned into a small muddy stream, busily rushing off somewhere. We drove forever, exhausting the poor horse, and, finally, after successfully eluding the Polivanovo field, one of the most difficult places, I became too bold and got Aunt Masha so mired that I nearly drowned the horse and the sleigh; we had to unharness to pull it out and got wet to the eyebrows; in a word, total “local color.”


I remember the feeling I had that spring of growing strength, but that entire happy springtime din, for all the beauty and joy of awakening nature, could not muffle the sense of alarm that squeezed the heart in each of us. Either some hand rose in senseless fury to profane our Sergiyevskoye, or there was the troubling sense that our loving and closely welded family was being broken up: Sonia far off somewhere with a pile of kids, alone, separated from her husband; Seryozha, just married, we don’t know where or how, and you, my dear Uncle Grisha and Auht Masha, separated from your young ones, in constant worry over them. It was a hard and difficult time. But I believe that beyond these specific problems, this spiritual fog had a deeper common source: we all, old and young, stood then at a critical turning point: unaware of it, we were bidding farewell to a past filled with beloved memories, while ahead there loomed some hostile utterly unknown future.


And in the midst of all this came Holy Week. the spring was in that stage when nature, after a big shove to cast off winter’s shackles, suddenly grows quiet, as if resting from the first victory. But below this apparent calm there is always the sense of a complex, hidden process taking place somewhere deep in the earth, which is preparing to open up in all its force, in all the beauty of growth and flowering. Plowing and seeding the earth rasied rich scents, and, following the plow on the sweaty, softly turning furrow, you were enveloped in the marvelous smell of moist earth. I always became intoxicated by that smell, because in it one senses the limitless creative power of nature.


I don’t know how you all felt at the time, because I lived a totally separate life and worked from morning to night in the fields, not seeing, and, yes, not wanting to see, anything else. It was too painful to think, and only total physical exhaustion gave one a chance, if not to forget, then at least to forget oneself. But with Holy Week began the services in church and at home, I had to lead the choir in rehearsal and in church; on Holy Wednesday I finished the sowing of oats and, putting away the plow and harrow, gave myself entirely over to the tuning fork. And here began that which I will never forget!


Dear Uncle Grishanchik! Do you remember the service of the Twelve Gospels in our Sergiyevskoye church? Do you remember that marvelous, inimitable manner of our little parson? This spring will be nine years that he passed away during the midnight Easter service, but even now, when I hear certain litanies or certain Gospel readings, I can hear the exhilarated voice of our kind parson, his intonations piercing to the very soul. I remember that you were taken by this service, that it had a large impact on you. I see now the huge crucifix rising in the midst of the church, with figures of the Mother of God on one side and the Apostle John on the other, framed by multicolored votive lights, the waving flame of many candles, and, among the thoroughly familiar throng of Sergiyevskoye peasants, your figure by the right wall in front of the candle counter, with a contemplative expression on your face. If you only knew what was happening in my soul at that time! It was an entire turnover, some huge, healing revelation!


Don’t be surprised that I’m writing this way; I don’t think I’m exaggerating anything, it’s just that I feel great emotion remembering all these things, because I am continuously breaking off to go to the window and listen. A quiet, starry night hangs over Moscow, and I can hear first one, then another church mark the successive Gospels with slow, measured strikes of the bell. I think of my Lina and our Marinochka, of Papa, Mama, my sisters, brothers, of all of you, feeling the sadness of expatriation in these days, all so dear and close. However painful, especially at this time, the awareness of our separation, I firmly, unshakably believe all the same that the hour will come when we will all gather together, just as you are all gathered now in my thoughts.


1/14 April – They’ve allowed me to finish writing letters, and I deliberately sat down to finish it this night. Any minute now the Easter matins will start; in our cell everything is clean, and on our large common table stand kulichi and paskha, a huge “X.B.” [Christos Voskrese “Christ is risen”] from fresh watercress is beautifully arranged on a white table cloth with brightly colored eggs all around. It’s unusually quiet in the cell; in order not to arouse the guards, we all lay down on lowered cots (there are 24 of us) in anticipation of the bells, and I sat down to write to you again.


I remember I walked out of the Sergiyevskoye church at that time overwhelmed by a mass of feelings and sensations, and my earlier spiritual fog seemed a trifle, deserving of no attention. In the great images of the Holy Week services, the horror of man’s sin and the suffering of the Creator leading to the great triumph of the resurrection, I suddenly discovered that eternal, indestructible beginning, which was also in that temporarily quiet spring, hiding in itself the seed of a total renewal of all that lives. The services continued in their stern, rich order; images replaced images, and when, on Holy Saturday, after the singing of “Arise, O Lord,” the deacon, having changed into a white robe, walked into the center of the church to the burial cloth to read the gospel about the resurrection, it seemed to me that we are all equally shaken, that we all feel and pray as one.


In the meantime, spring went on the offensive. When we walked to the Easter matins, the night was humid, heavy clouds covered the sky, and walking through the dark alleys of the linden park, I imagined a motion in the ground, as if innumerable invisible plants were pushing through the earth toward air and light.


I don’t know if our midnight Easter matins made any impression on you then. For me there never was, and never will be, anything better than Easter at Seriyevskoye. We are all too organically tied to Sergiyevskoye for anything to transcend it, to evoke so much good. This is not blind patriotism, because for all of us Seriyevskoye was that spiritual cradle in which everything by which each of us lives and breathes was born and raised.


My dear Uncle Grishanchik, as I’ve been writing to you the scattered ringing around Moscow has become a mighty festive peal. Processions have begun, the sounds of firecrackers reach us, one church after another joins the growing din of bells. The wave of sound swells. There! Somewhere entirely nearby, a small church breaks brightly through the common chord with such a joyous, exultant little voice. Sometimes it seems that the tumult has begun to wane, and suddenly a new wave rushes in with unexpected strength, a grand hymn between heaven and earth.


I cannot write any more! That which I now hear is too overwhelming, too good, to try to convey in words. The incontrovertible sermon of the Resurrection seems to rise from this mighty peal of praise. My dear uncle Grishanchik, it is so good in my soul that the only way I can express my spirit is to say to you once again, Christ is Risen!


Georgy


One more thing. I am thinking about Terrence Malick’s recent film, A Hidden Lifewhich you can now rent from Amazon Prime for $5.99 — and that scene in which Franz visits the artist painting images from the life of Christ on the walls of the village church. The artist says that most people are admirers of Christ, when what Christ really wants is followers. The old artist tells Franz, “Christ’s life is a demand.  You don’t want to be reminded of it.”


Malick surely got this from the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who, in his book Training In Christianity, wrote:


It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression “follower.” He never asks for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. No, he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for. Christ understood that being a “disciple” was in innermost and deepest harmony with what he said about himself. Christ claimed to be the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6). For this reason, he could never be satisfied with adherents who accepted his teaching – especially with those who in their lives ignored it or let things take their usual course. His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible. Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time – as is implied in his saving work – he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower. This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness. It is absolutely impossible for anyone to sneak away from the Pattern with excuse and evasion on the basis that It, after all, possessed earthly and worldly advantages that he did not have. In that sense, to admire Christ is the false invention of a later age, aided by the presumption of “loftiness.” No, there is absolutely nothing to admire in Jesus, unless you want to admire poverty, misery, and contempt.


What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached. He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires. To want to admire instead of to follow Christ is not necessarily an invention by bad people. No, it is more an invention by those who spinelessly keep themselves detached, who keep themselves at a safe distance. Admirers are related to the admired only through the excitement of the imagination. To them he is like an actor on the stage except that, this being real life, the effect he produces is somewhat stronger. But for their part, admirers make the same demands that are made in the theater: to sit safe and calm. Admirers are only all too willing to serve Christ as long as proper caution is exercised, lest one personally come in contact with danger. As such, they refuse to accept that Christ’s life is a demand. In actual fact, they are offended at him. His radical, bizarre character so offends them that when they honestly see Christ for who he is, they are no longer able to experience the tranquility they so much seek after. They know full well that to associate with him too closely amounts to being up for examination. Even though he “says nothing” against them personally, they know that his life tacitly judges theirs. And Christ’s life indeed makes it manifest, terrifyingly manifest, what dreadful untruth it is to admire the truth instead of following it. When there is no danger, when there is a dead calm, when everything is favorable to our Christianity, it is all too easy to confuse an admirer with a follower. And this can happen very quietly. The admirer can be in the delusion that the position he takes is the true one, when all he is doing is playing it safe. Give heed, therefore, to the call of discipleship!


If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, who can doubt that Judas was an admirer of Christ! And we know that Christ at the beginning of his work had many admirers. Judas was precisely an admirer and thus later became a traitor. It is just as easy to reckon as the stars that those who only admire the truth will, when danger appears, become traitors. The admirer is infatuated with the false security of greatness; but if there is any inconvenience or trouble, he pulls back. Admiring the truth, instead of following it, is just as dubious a fire as the fire of erotic love, which at the turn of the hand can be changed into exactly the opposite, to hate, jealousy, and revenge. There is a story of yet another admirer – it was Nicodemus (Jn. 3:1ff). Despite the risk to his reputation, despite the effort on his part, Nicodemus was only an admirer; he never became a follower. It is as if he might have said to Christ, “If we are able to reach a compromise, you and I, then I will accept your teaching in eternity. But here in this world, no, that I cannot bring myself to do. Could you not make an exception for me? Could it not be enough if once in a while, at great risk to myself, I come to you during the night, but during the day (yes, I confess it, I myself feel how humiliating this is for me and how disgraceful, indeed also how very insulting it is toward you) to say “I do not know you?” See in what a web of untruth an admirer can entangle himself.


Nicodemus, I am quite sure, was certainly well meaning. I’m also sure he was ready to assure and reassure in the strongest expressions, words, and phrases that he accepted the truth of Christ’s teaching. Yet, is it not true that the more strongly someone makes assurances, while his life still remains unchanged, the more he is only making a fool of himself? If Christ had permitted a cheaper edition of being a follower – an admirer who swears by all that is high and holy that he is convinced – then Nicodemus might very well have been accepted. But he was not! Now suppose that there is no longer any special danger, as it no doubt is in so many of our Christian countries, bound up with publicly confessing Christ. Suppose there is no longer need to journey in the night. The difference between following and admiring – between being, or at least striving to be – still remains. Forget about this danger connected with confessing Christ and think rather of the real danger which is inescapably bound up with being a Christian. Does not the Way – Christ’s requirement to die to the world, to forgo the worldly, and his requirement of self-denial – does this not contain enough danger? If Christ’s commandment were to be obeyed, would they not constitute a danger? Would they not be sufficient to manifest the difference between an admirer and a follower? The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all his strength, with all his will to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a “Christian people,” the same danger results for him as was once the case when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ. And because of the follower’s life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him. Even that these words are presented as they are here will disturb many – but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.


Now, reading this, I can imagine someone saying, “Don’t you see? To be a follower of Christ means to put ourselves in danger, for His sake. To risk catching this deadly disease by going to church — to not play it safe by sitting at home.” To which I say: What makes you so sure? Peter, in the garden, put himself at great risk to defend Jesus by physically attacking, and seriously injuring the high priest’s servant. But it was not what Jesus wanted him to do. Like I said, the greater struggle for Peter in that moment was the inner struggle. And as we know from later in the Gospels, Peter, so courageous in that moment in the garden, failed miserably when he denied three times knowing Jesus. Peter’s own conversion was incomplete, despite the fact that in that moment in the garden, he shed blood to defend his Master.


How do we, in our time, in this crisis, know whether or not we are to risk physical danger to serve Christ, or whether we are being called to stay home and deepen our conversion by cultivating a heart for sacrifice in stillness? Well, one good way to know is whether or not we are obedient to our bishops, even when we may not agree with them. Nobody has ever accused me of being soft on the episcopal class, but I think they are making some wise and difficult decisions here. This morning on CNN, Jake Tapper questioned Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards about why he declined to cancel the February 25 Mardi Gras celebration even though he had received a sobering federal briefing on February 9 about what was likely to come. I think it was a fair question, but it’s also important to say that at that point, had this or any Louisiana governor cancelled Mardi Gras, it would have taken a heck of a lot of courage, because it would have been an extremely unpopular decision. The people wouldn’t have stood for it. Yet as we now know, it would have been the right thing to have done. I feel the same way about the calls the bishops are making now. Many of us may think they are being cowardly, but I think judging them harshly for making a choice that stands to save lives is a matter of pride and presumption.


Again, the twist in applying Kierkegaard’s observation to our situation is that the comfortable thing for regular churchgoers to do is to go to church in this time of crisis. But is that what God is asking us to do? Who would Peter have been to question Christ’s order to put away his sword? Jesus asked Peter, “Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given Me?” The suffering the Father has given to us Christians in this grim Lent of 2020 is to abide with him in prayer and obedience, and inquiring into our own hearts what this little apocalypse is showing us about our own failure to be fully converted, to be completely conformed to Christ.


You have to know when to draw your sword, and know when to put it away. This requires wisdom and discernment. When you consider how your Lent is spent, think of John Milton’s words in Sonnet 19, about how those who serve God best are those who best bear his yoke:



When I consider how my light is spent,
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
   And that one Talent which is death to hide
   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest he returning chide;
   “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
   They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Here endeth the lesson.

How is your Palm Sunday?

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Published on April 05, 2020 10:45

April 4, 2020

Pandemic Diaries 19

Look at that! My wife went to Target today and bought me three six-packs of diet Snapple (peach flavor). Boy, was I ever happy.


Tonight for supper, I made some spaghetti I brought back from Italy (it tastes noticeably better), dressed with asparagus tips I cooked down in olive oil, onion, and lots of garlic. It was delicious.



As a family, we sang and said a Reader’s Vespers service. Then Lucas and I retired to the TV room to watch Amadeus. And those were the day’s highlight.


Over to you good people.


From Queens, New York:


Thanks for the Pandemic updates. Reading the stories from your readers has been cathartic and encouraging. Which is why I didn’t plan on adding my two cents, in part, because I’m at the front end of the US’s story and it almost seemed cruel to talk about something that I know is coming their way. Why make things worse for them? Today, however, I’ve reached a point where I just need to express what many of us in New York are feeling, in an attempt to focus those who are refusing to face reality.


Over the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed, on one hand, a liberal friend whose rabid hatred of Trump is so all-consuming that every Instagram post spirals further and further into Dr. Strangelove hysteria, as if Trump created the virus, utterly oblivious to the heartache coming to his safe suburban cul-de-sac. On the flip side, my sister tells me about her Facebook friend who posted a video apparently “proving” the virus is a Democrat hoax and saying that Elmhurst Hospital in Queens is empty. She shared this information a day after my 22 year-old son returned from his first day of work at Elmhurst–the supposed empty hospital–as an emergency civilian employee hired by the city to help the overwhelmed hospital staff. He went to the hospital expecting his job to include clerical stuff, phone calls, basic admin. Upon arrival, however, he was told that because of a dearth of workers, he would be part of the morgue detail, moving dead bodies out to the refrigerated trucks. 22 years old, civilian, no training. (He’s trying to get reassigned.) If these plebeians think Elmhurst Hospital is empty, they should feel free to work in my son’s stead. Without a mask. He said it was chaotic and definitely not empty. I drove by the hospital this morning at 8am. There was already a line of sick people standing 20 feet apart, waiting to enter the tent where they get tested before admittance (if they’re bad enough).


It feels like so many people are consumed with their myopic tribal cult-like mantras that they are making things much worse for the rest of us. And it’s pretty bad right now. We’re finishing only week three of lock-down and my elderly neighbor Jack has died, my teenager’s classmate Jose found his dad dead on the floor Monday morning, our neighbor lost a 28 year-old asthmatic friend today, George from two doors down went out in an ambulance and we still can’t get word of his condition, and our son watched the National Guard carry another neighbor out in a body bag yesterday. In one day I’ve gotten prayer requests for James, a husband and father of three teens, on a ventilator with organ failure; Cara and Barbara, two mothers in their 60’s fighting the virus at home with coughs and temps of 104; Adam, in his 30’s, rushed to the hospital from the excruciating pain of breathing what felt like lungs full of broken glass; two young nurses fresh out of school terrified as their first job is working the Covid floors; and a family trying to figure out how to work in ICU and come home to their extended family without spreading the disease. Instead of Amber Alerts on my phone, I am regularly getting alerts calling for any certified medical professionals to volunteer their services. My friend is an anesthesiologist in the ICU of one of the city’s largest hospitals. They have 5 times the number of intubated patients than usual. They have emptied all the operating rooms and the ER and have turned them into ICU beds for ventilator beds. She expects it to get worse for at least another week. This is one hospital but they’re all like that. If you have a heart attack, appendicitis, car accident, stroke, allergic reaction, or any of the myriad problems that typically put a person in the ER, don’t go to the hospital. Maybe the ship in the Hudson will take you once they get through the paperwork.


The weight of loss and low-level anticipatory fear is increasing with each day. The panic is gone. Now it’s just dread. Will I get it? Did I get it? Was I asymptomatic but infected someone who died from it? When I get it, will it be a headache and slight cough? Will I be in such pain I wish I was dead? Will I be intubated but die from organ failure anyway? Will I make it through three weeks of ventilation but have significant long-term and possible permanent damage to my body or my brain? These are the options. To see people cavalierly telling us we’re being fooled or we just need to be strong or get rid of Trump and Samaritans Purse or be our best selves or whatever empty rot that the average activist/influencer is spreading is absolutely demoralizing for those of us drowning in death. And don’t get me started on the elite New Yorkers, safe in their doorman buildings, 6 and 7-figure jobs intact, arguing that Samaritans Purse should be run out of town because a “person on the margins” might not feel safe. The utter disregard for the people who might now have a chance at a bed and continued life is beyond me. Jonathan Merritt should be ashamed of himself. Without those additional beds, they will be sent home with only an inhaler like Jose’s (now dead) dad when he tried to get admitted. If you look at the map of the zip-codes hit hardest by the virus, it ain’t Park Slope or the Upper Westside. The neighborhoods with the highest concentration are where the real persons on the margins live. It’s unconscionable that these activists choose this dire moment to cram their agenda down dying people’s throats. We do not need this intellectually lazy, vapid blather from people who cannot see what’s right in front of them.


So this is where I am. The night before Palm Sunday. As a Christian, I know not to put my faith in princes. I know where my future lies. So I’m working God’s word into my every fiber and remembering to Whom I belong. And He’s giving me courage and peace. But boy, it’s not easy, with these careless proclamations and insipid claims of expertise polluting the airways. Stop. Please just stop. And get ready. Because it’s coming your way.


From northwest Ohio:


We are in northwest Ohio, south of Toledo. Thanks to reading you and your letters from Wyoming Doc, we were well prepared with food, medicine and other supplies and it came as no surprise when everything began closing down. I will echo what others from Ohio have reported about how impressive Gov. Mike DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton have been in their leadership. It seemed like an overreaction for many at the time but most have come around quickly in the past three weeks.


It is an odd feeling walking around our suburban neighborhood, where everything seems normal on the surface but there is an underlying level of tension to all interactions. Our neighbor across the street will be 95 years old on Tuesday, was a veteran in WWII and has outlived two wives. We asked him (from safely across the street) if he had seen anything like this in his lifetime, and he responded “No, not ever.”


My husband is a school psychologist, so he is working from home now but is still responsible for meeting state deadlines and ensuring special education students are well served by their school district, so he is regularly having virtual meetings and writing reports. I work for our local library, which is currently closed, but staff are expected to be utilizing Continuing Education resources in the meantime. Our staff are also providing virtual services such as Children’s Storytime and “Chat with a Reference Librarian.” Thankfully our family is fine financially as we are both still being paid for the near future. Our Mennonite church is in the process of figuring out how to meet online- last week all participants such as Scripture readers, piano player, children’s time speaker and Pastor all used Zoom to piece together the routine of a regular service. I tend to lean Luddite towards technology, and over the past few months tech for me has simultaneously become an indispensable lifeline and also been exposed for a thin facsimile of real human encounters.


Our children are in their first year at the local Catholic school where they had recently begun to adjust and make some friends (4th, 3rd, and 1st grades). Schooling from home is less “homeschooling” than it is coordinating with teachers online to make sure kids finish all pre-arranged assignments. Our oldest just had her 10th birthday yesterday and she was very disappointed that she could not have any friends or family over to celebrate. I think we managed to have a good birthday for her, the main difference being that Grandma and Grandpa and aunts/uncles/cousins got to watch her blow out candles over Zoom. We have tried to walk the fine line between making our kids aware of the seriousness of the situation and trying to make the time at home as peaceful and meaningful as possible.


In your blog posts recently you have mentioned your admiration for NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his bold stand for life in this crisis, even going so far as to suggest that the Democrats should find a way to put him on the presidential ticket instead of Joe Biden. I lived in western New York State for the first 25 years of my life, and I can tell you there is a simmering resentment towards the city and the politicians who so often prioritize NYC over the rest of the state. Politically most of the state is Republican but their votes are outnumbered by NYC, so many positions state level and higher are filled by Democrats. The state has one of the higher tax rates in the nation but the peoples’ perception is that most or all of the tax money goes to help the city, leaving our rural areas economically run-down and struggling. Whether true or not, this is the belief of almost everyone I know from western NY. Then in the past few days Gov. Cuomo announced that he will be signing an executive order authorizing the National Guard to redistribute ventilators and PPE from hospitals around the state that aren’t using them. I wanted to write to tell you that this is how Cuomo will be perceived throughout the rest of the state, once again siphoning off resources from upstate to be directed to New York City and its needs and leaving our rural hospitals with less resources. To be fair, he has clarified to say he would not be “seizing” ventilators from upstate, and the intention is to replace or reimburse any redistributed equipment. Still, the damaging perception is now embedded in people’s minds, regardless of how this order is implemented.


Cuomo’s original announcement:

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/amid...

Reactions from several state officials:

https://news.wbfo.org/post/governors-...


Apologies for the length of this letter, and thank you for the time you spend reading and curating these. Best wishes to you and your family.


From Houston:


Like most folks, I getting used to the life of quarantine, lock downs, and social distancing. Though we could quibble over prudential courses of action in the face of this crisis, the fact that it has come upon us during Lent, should cause one to take notice and to begin thinking about some things. I know I have been.


The fact that we will not have Holy Week services this week is excruciating. Of course, we remotely link up with Mass at our Parish and make an act of Spiritual Communion. I’m grateful that we have the technology and the personal means to do this, but it is not the same. I had the great privilege of having the Mass said everyday at the school where I teach. I have to be honest and say that I took that tremendous grace for granted, some days choosing to get some extra work in for just rest in between classes. By the grace of God, I will not make that mistake again.


However, it is not all a loss. By the grace of God, a priest at our parish will hear our family’s confessions next week. When I got confirmation, I cannot begin to express the joy that I experienced.


Below is a poem, albeit it, a long one, that I recently completed regarding the virus. I am naturally a fearful and worrying sort of person, but that sort of life is a burden. Our Lord tells us to be of good cheer in the face of tribulation, for as He say’s, He has overcome the World. This poem was written with that in mind even if it is not explicit. The world is so full of His Goodness and Beauty, even in the face of suffering and trouble. Nothing can really drown the reality of this fact- no pandemic, no economic collapse, no suffering and no death. It can only be lost by those of us who have become illiterate to the Grammar of His Existence that He has written into the world. Each flower, cloud, person, memory, suffering, and joy is just but one precious syllable in the great narrative that he is composing our redemption and His Glory.


God’s best to you and yours and to all who read this blog.


Covid19


“Signs undergo a…devolution.

[For instance, a sparrow can]

disappear in the sarcophagus

of its sign. But a recovery

is possible. A sparrow

can be recovered under

the conditions of catastrophe.”

– Walker Percy

“…the overall aspect of life is

not a state of need and hunger,

but instead, wealth, bounty,

even absurd squandering… .”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

I.


The morning is still.

The sky is a steel sheet

shrouding the neighborhood.

No one is going

to work today and

the children will all

be home from school.

In the distance,

a long flight of Grackles

train the sky

in a migratory wave

of darkness.

The pitch of their screeching

fills the air.

Then they are gone,

and it is silent.

Only the sound

of the mourning dove,

and the whir

of a lone passenger jet

stir the waking air.


For a people


perpetually in motion,

an imposition of stillness,

is a sort of forced purgation.


Let him who can, accept it.


II.


From the Amazonian Basin

the Martins have returned.

They soften the sky

in airy arabesques.

Just above the willows


an egret passes,

the steadiness of its wing beat

keeping time with the breath

of hours. Cirrocumulus clouds

dab long, white rows


along the blue, canvas sky,

then melt further out

into featureless sheets,

sunlight piercing them

in thin shafts of bright,

yellowed glass.


The day continues

its retirement

in soft breezes fragrant

with orange blossoms.

The sky is still blue, but

turning to hues of twilight.


Slowly, comes the night,

the sky still blind of stars,

save for Orion’s Rigel,

gleaming brightly

like a tiny, glass bead.


It is a time of trouble.

Though around the time

the light left that star

Henry IV’s outburst left

Beckett dead at the altar.


For a people who long for

worldly and personal security

an imposition of stillness,

is to come into the twilight

of a perennial delusion.


Let him who can, renounce it.


III.


She didn’t want to come.

She wanted to stay home

and play with a friend.

She is coming to the age

where peers begin to

overshadow parents.

But she came, her silence

filling the car like a fog.

The landscape begins

to roll and she begins

taking note of the carpets

of wildflowers and the wandering

cattle in the fields.


The fog begins to lift.


Driving westward

the fields turn

in kaleidoscopic

carpets of primrose,

prairie fire, and

bluebonnets.

The clouds part,

the sunlight runs across

the prairie floor

setting it ablaze

in bright fires

of bitterweed.


The tree-ringed pond is quiet,

only passing clouds

stir its surface.

In full bloom,

a huisache leans over

the pond’s edge,

her canopy cascading over

the water.

To an uncluttered mind

she is a supple dryad

bathing, her saffron hair

singing sunlight

and fragrant with spring.


At the site of Old Baylor,

she leads her brother to

climb the oaks, bent and

gnarled from many years.

They begin to explore the

scattered old buildings.

“Daddy! Come here!”, she

shouts. She is waving to

me from the porch of the old

schoolhouse. “Can you

believe they all went to

school in one room?”

The doors are locked

but from the old porch

she peers through the

window, calling out what

she sees inside. Her hand

holds the door facing

as she looks in. Against

the old clapboard,

her hand is so new,

softly absorbing

the accumulation of years

and the echoes of ghosts.


She and I look out

from Academy Hill.

The ruins of Tryon Hall behind us,

the meadow spreads outward in

rolling waves of prairie fire,

bluebonnets and waving grass,

cresting in dappled groves

of oak and ash.

The clouds build themselves

into billowy palaces,

ephemeral structures

of light and shade

towering above the

rolling landscape

so reminiscent of

the studies of Constable.


It is a time of trouble.

But here we are.

Some to walk along the

wildflower meadows,

other to takes pictures

of bright faced children

among the bluebonnets.

Two hundred years before us,

the first Anglo’s came,

and before them, the Spanish,

but this land has seen

some form of human habitation for,

at least, nine thousand years,

paleo-tribes like the Xaraname.

They were here long before

the first stone was laid at Giza.

They are gone now,

as the others, and

as we will be, and

as those who come

after us.


For a people

perpetually in a state of agitation,

an imposition of stillness,

is what, in a more attuned time,

would be considered a form of mercy.


Let him who may, see it.


IV.


The day closes and the sky is free of clouds.

No trace of the sun save for the horizon

oozing the plasma of its descending amber.

Just above it, the sky is colorless,

then ascends in shades of pale blue.

The sky is clean glass, holding no shadow

save for the distant flight of birds.


Then further up, almost out of sight,

the moon shows a slender crescent,

faint as breath on pane of glass.

It will be a sign in the hours deepening

toward darkness. shining as warmly

as the light that beckons beneath

the door to a darkened room.


For a people afflicted with a time of trouble,

an imposition of stillness is an opportunity

to affirm something greater than

trouble is here.


Let him who knows

that he is weak,

with good cheer,

ask for the courage

to arise and to seek.


From Memphis:


Here in Memphis we are seeing a rising number of Covid 19 cases, but still not at a high level. But we had a taste of the terrible things to come when our beloved pastor, Tim Russell, died from complications of Covid 19 earlier this week. The social distancing makes it more difficult to minister to the grieving, but our choir found a way to try to provide some comfort to Tim’s widow:



Keep them coming, friends. Write to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and don’t forget to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and include where you’re writing from.


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Published on April 04, 2020 23:37

Seeing Reality With Eyes Of Faith

A reader sends this message. She gave me personal information about herself and her family, but asked me to withhold it. She writes, in response to the Omen post. Make of this what you will:


I don’t usually remember my dreams, but I this one was particularly vivid and it’s never been repeated. It happened at least 8 years ago and has heavily influenced my decision making. In this dream, I saw a flood wiping over everything, then everyone froze in place. When I woke up I didn’t know what to think. I felt like I had been given a warning, but wasn’t sure what to make of it. But, here’s the clincher. The next morning at church as I sat there pondering the meaning of the dream, a complete stranger walked up to me told me that God told her to share a bible verse with me. She said that I should be strong in the lord and witness to what he says. I remember feeling like the blood was draining out of my face. I told her about my dream and she was convinced it was real. She later sent me the bible verse.


The concerns that I had at the time were 1) that things that we take for granted could become inaccessible 2) that skills would be lost, whatever that meant, and 3) I needed to learn as much as I could. I am a stay at home mom with a degree in science so the first few years I was obsessed with learning about medicinal plants and identifying edible plants. I remember being really worried that antibiotics would be the hardest to replace. I have tried to hone up on basic skills that my great-grandmother’s generation would have taken for granted, like baking bread. Over the years with no clear direction, unfortunately my zeal has waned.


I’m definitely not a hard-core disaster prepper, but when I saw this pandemic coming back in January, all of it came back to me. By March 1, my pantry was stocked and overflowing. I still have toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Yay! I’m hoping that there are no floods in store for us, after all this time I’m assuming that my vision was more about being prepared in the face of an uncertain future. After seeing all of the articles about how we are reliant on supplies and medicines (antibiotics) that we no longer have the ability to make here in the US and people are losing their jobs because they are considered non-essential, I get why I would be given a message about skills being lost.


I think that everyone will look at life through a different lens after this is over. I’m thankful that I have been watching your blog because I think that you were in the right place and knew the right people to give us the advanced warning that we needed. Due to your influence we took our kids out of school and put them in a classical Christian school at the beginning of the school year. Consequently, they have been doing school online since last week while the public school is still figuring out what to do. My husband is a physician, I gave plenty of warning to my church and family, and so far, all seem to be doing well. I want to leave you with the bible verses that the dear lady mailed to me. “Be strong with the strength Christ Jesus gives you. Stand steady, and don’t be afraid of suffering for the lord. Bring others to Christ. Leave nothing undone that you ought to do” II Tim 2:1; 4:5(TLB).


Like I said, make of it what you will.


You don’t need to believe in visions and prophecies to read the signs of the times. But some people — including people of faith — refuse to do so. A Christian friend reaches out this morning to complain about people in his church community who are still refusing to take coronavirus seriously. People — believing, observant Christians — who are passing around images of empty hospital parking lots, saying that this is all exaggerated. Another Christian reader told me this morning that in her social media feed, she’s seeing a lot of the same kind of denial, and anger at the leaders of her church for shutting the church’s doors during this pandemic.


The first reader, a Catholic, said that this 1964 quote from Joseph Ratzinger comes to mind when he thinks of the Covid denialists in his circles:


[A] faith that will not account for half of the facts or even more is actually, in essence, a kind of refusal of faith, or at least, a very profound form of skepticism that fears faith will not be big enough to cope with reality. … [T]rue believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.


Is that ever true, and much needed right now. I told that reader that the quote reminds me of the arguments I’ve had over the past three years with many other theologically conservative Christians about The Benedict Option. It’s not that they are looking at the same set of facts about the decline of the Christian faith in terms of numbers, and/or in terms of theological literacy and orthodoxy, and arriving at different conclusions about how to face the crisis. It’s that they deny that there is a crisis at all. In my experience, not too many conservative Christians flat-out deny it; the numbers are too obvious. The strategy is more psychologically sophisticated than that. It goes like this:


 Dreher says that the faith is in steep decline in the West. Dreher also says that believers need to head for the hills and live in separatist communities to keep the faith. But the Bible says we are to evangelize and serve people in the world. We can’t do either if we are hiding out in our hillside bunkers. Therefore Dreher is wrong about the crisis.


When I point out to them that I do not, in fact, say that we need to head for the hills and live in separatist communes, but rather that we need to form tighter communities of spiritual and moral discipline so that we can keep the faith in the tough times ahead, that makes no difference to them, I have found. Seriously, it’s the most bizarre thing. Christians who have not even read the book, but who have still concluded that it must be wrong. After a while, I decided that the whole thing is a strategy of denial. The specific strategies I recommend in The Benedict Option may be mistaken, but the diagnosis is not. Or at least I haven’t read anyone who has plausibly challenged that diagnosis from a morally and theologically conservative point of view. (Progressive Christians, on the other hand, would see moral and theological progress where we conservatives see decline — though even progressives, if they’re honest, have to admit that their numbers are in steep decline.)


I receive these stories about Christian Covid denialists as a pathological version of Benedict Option denialists. Why? Because the Covid denialists are terrified that The Bad Thing Might Be True, because if the Bad Thing is true, then the assumptions upon which they have built their stable lives are falling to bits. And they will have to change their lives if they are going to survive. For some people — for a lot of people — it is easier to pretend the Bad Thing isn’t happening than to look at it with open eyes, and prepare to face it in such a way that you survive the trial.


Look, I’m not being judgey. I’ve been thinking these past two weeks about how we are living in my household during this terrible time when we are denied the liturgy (which is to say, church on Sunday). Here I am, the guy who wrote a book about dark days ahead, when Christians are going to have to rely on spiritual strengths and disciplines developed in a time of ease and liberty, to get us through what’s coming. Now, out of nowhere, and in a way I did not expect, we face a trial. Have I been leading my own household spiritually as I should have been doing? No, I have not. I have my reasons, but the fact is, I have not been taking my own diagnosis and warnings as seriously as I should have. This has been part of my own personal apocalypse (unveiling) of this crisis.


Today my parish learned that we won’t even be able to have livestreamed services for the duration of the crisis. The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America (my jurisdiction) has ordered that any priest who has had contact with anyone who works in a medical facility treating Covid patients is prohibited from celebrating the liturgy in a church building. Our priest is married to a nurse. Therefore, here in Baton Rouge, we can’t have services until this crisis is over. God only knows when that will be.


What a blow. My God. We are now denied even the livestream at our parish. The thing is, I don’t hold any animosity towards the Synod for this. The world has to defeat this virus. Aside from the mass death we’re seeing, the entire economy is careening towards collapse. I know people who have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. If the governor opened the economy up tomorrow, it could not possibly thrive with tens of thousands more falling ill and dying at home, because there are no beds in the hospitals to handle the numbers. What choice do the bishops have, really? Or church pastors? We are prepared, maybe, for a catastrophic crisis in which we can gather together in our churches to pray, to worship, to comfort each other, and, if we’re a sacramental church, receive the Body of Christ — all of which gives us strength to weather the trials.


But this? Did anybody expect a crisis in which we could not come together, to be the church, and to strengthen each other as the church, shoulder to shoulder, face to face, with the Eucharist? I did not. Or at least I anticipated that we would have a situation in which coming to church posed a risk of paying a price, as under the Chinese social credit system. But if you’re strong in faith, you’ll be willing to pay that price. This thing, though, in which going to church could give you a deadly disease, or put you in a position where you spread the deadly disease to others? No. The particular evil of this trial is that it atomizes us even more, and forces us to resist our natural instincts to hands-on compassion.


Yet here we are. What are we going to do about it?


I know what I’ve got to do: double down on the Benedict Option, in terms of being more disciplined in daily prayer, in my life and in my family’s life, so we can have what it takes to get us through the long run. The news this morning made me realize that I have been counting on this thing winding down somehow this summer, and all of us getting back to church. In truth, that’s probably not going to happen. I could sit here and complain, and lament that the rain won’t stop … or I could get busy building an ark, like I talk about in The Benedict Option.


We are not going to be able to go back to normal anytime soon. The disease won’t allow it, and if, by some miracle, scientists come up with a vaccine, it’s not going to be soon enough to stave off economic devastation. You don’t need to believe in an eight-year-old apocalyptic dream you read about on the Internet to see that. And in truth, none of us know when we will be able to go back to church. Even if the authorities allow it, the virus will still be present, silently moving among us, unseen. Many, many of us will not be able to go to church, not because we are men and women of little faith, but because we don’t want to risk dying, and spreading a deadly disease to others.


So what do we do? How do we keep our faith strong through this trial? The first thing we have to do is to stop living in denial. And stop dwelling in anger at the religious and civil authorities. This is a virus, not a political ideology. No one alive today in the West has ever had to deal with anything like this.


Remember my story about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Croatian Jesuit who escaped the Nazis in 1943, and arrived in Bratislava to tell Slovak Catholics that after the war, Communists would rule their country? He told them that they had to prepare for that dread day, while there was time. A number of priests thought Kolakovic was an alarmist, but he attracted young followers, who took him seriously, and did what he told them. In 1946, he was expelled from the country; in 1948, the Communists took control of Czechoslovakia, and soon began throwing priests and Christian leaders into prison. The “Family,” as Father Kolakovic’s followers were called, emerged as the backbone of the underground church.


Father T. Kolakovic

I tell their story in my forthcoming (September) book Live Not By Lies, but it’s important in the context of this post for a particular reason. What Father Kolakovic could see, and many of the other priests in Czechoslovakia could not, was that when the Communists took power, they would try to crush the faith of the Catholic people by neutralizing the clergy. Father K. did his best to encourage the laity to educate themselves, so they could join with priests in the underground to keep the faith alive through the persecution. And things happened exactly as Kolakovic foresaw. I spoke to a Catholic lawyer in Bratislava who said the state passed a law greatly restricting the work of priests. They were paralyzed. The work of the Church had to be done, to a previously unknown extent, by faithful lay Catholics. They couldn’t administer the sacraments, of course, but they could do a lot in terms of education, through seminars and the underground Catholic press, and so forth. And they became the accomplices of secretly ordained priests and bishops of the underground.


There’s a lesson in that for us. A hostile government has not shuttered our churches; a hostile virus has. We don’t know when any of us will be able to resume normal church life. What do we do between now and then? Live in denial, or whine about the bishops and the governor, or complain about how hard it is?


Or do we get to work building within our own hearts, minds, families, and communities, scattered though we are by circumstances, the framework of a durable faith for hard times?


One more thing — something you’ve heard before, but that I’m thinking a lot about right now. I’ve told you the story of Dr. Silvester Krcmery (kirch-MERRY), a Slovak physician who was one of Father Kolakovic’s disciples, and who, with Father Vladimir Jukl, another Kolakovic follower, set up the underground church. Dr. Krcmery is dead now, but before he passed, he left an account of his prison years. In this passage from a draft of my forthcoming book, I write about it:


In his 1996 memoir This Saved Us, Krcmery recalls that after repeated beatings, torture and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”


In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety,” he writes. “Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations.


The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.  


His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner smuggled into the jail. The Scripture Krcmery had already learned before the persecution started turned out to be a powerful aid behind bars.


“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain a priceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”


Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.


“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”


Silvester Krcmery

Krcmery structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. He interceded for specific people, and groups of people, including his captors. This was a way of ordering the oppressive expanse of time, especially during periods of solitary confinement. Krcmery and his fellow prisoners were astonished, repeatedly, that beatings and interrogations were easier to endure than seemingly ceaseless periods of waiting.


The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life, and his own sins, and embraced a spirit of repentance. At one point, Krcmery wondered if he was wasting his time and increasing his emotional and psychological burden by sticking to these day-long spiritual exercises.


“I attempted to live a few days entirely without a program, but it did not work,” he remembers. “When I thought that I would only vegetate for the whole day, and just rest, that is when there were the most crises.”


Why do I post that now? Because I have spent these early weeks of quarantine following no kind of schedule at all — certainly not a prayer schedule. I see now, re-reading Krcmery, that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Remember, this is the testimony of a man who had the mass taken away from him, who had his church community taken away from him, who had all his usual work in the world taken away from him. Not only that, he was beaten and tortured in prison. Yet he says elsewhere in his book that he resolved early on never, ever to feel sorry for himself. If he did that, he said, he would fall into a hole that he couldn’t climb out of. So he received this suffering — all of it — as a challenge to deepen his conversion, and to serve Christ, and his fellow prisoners.


We have to do the same. The suffering thrust upon us has to be received as a call to deeper prayer, deeper repentance, deeper service, and deeper unity with God. What else is there? You don’t need to be a visionary to see that. You only need to open your eyes to reality. As the future Pope Benedict XVI said in 1964, “True believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.”


 


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Published on April 04, 2020 12:43

April 3, 2020

Pandemic Diaries 18

Another mono beatdown day. Not much to report except a lot of sleeping and inability to focus. You know how much I like to post here — it feels weird and wrong not to do more. Compulsive, I know. I watched three episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and realized that I have turned into Larry David. So has everybody in my household, except our big-hearted, non-ironic, non-neurotic second child.


The New York Times ran this crazy piece today:



Who thinks that?! Don’t shake their hand, or stand too close. Is what I’m saying.


Oh, there was great news today: Nora found six bottles of diet Snapple today in the back of the pantry! Hallelujah! Three raspberries, two peaches, and fortunately, only one lemon.



This was me about two minutes later, exaltating like a lark:



I love diet Snapple so much, and wouldn’t you know but my diet Snapple dealer — who I won’t name, but it rhymes with “Fostco” — decided to quit carrying it right about the same time as the pandemic started. Can you believe? It’s the End Times. Anyway, after over a week without a drop of that fake-sweet, delicious tea, it was such a treat. Happy happy joy joy. It’s the little things.


By that way, above, that’s Nora making bagels today, from the King Arthur Flour cookbook,her favorite. She’s using her confinement to produce various bread things. That, and finding buried treasure in the back of the pantry.


Well, enough from here. Over to y’all.


From Long Island, New York:



There’s so much I can say right now, it’s hard deciding what to leave out. I just turned 36 this March, and have been struggling through a long recovery at home from an injury. Now CoViD-19, when I’ve just started to get my life back. It’s funny, I’ve been isolated for so long that this quarantine actually makes me feel closer to people, not more separated. Like the world has slowed down to my speed, just as I’m rising up to meet it. So I cant be pessimistic, not totally. I was suffering alone for years, despite everyone’s efforts to comfort me. Now for the first time in a long time, we are all speaking the same language about our fears, exchanging what we’ve read, and even sitting down to watch the same TV shows (Cuomo Briefs, Announcements, today’s death toll) at the same time. I haven’t seen that since high school season finales of Dawson’s Creek.

But certain things make me angry that I didn’t expect to do so. When reporters started fixating on the “100,000 deaths” projected by the model during the Whitehouse Briefing, I had the urge to shout “It’s not about how ‘big’ the number is, or if it’s 100K or a million! It’s about our people dying now!” And I have always been a news op-ed junkie, but now I cant stand the “Voice of reason” approach of so many writers that “It’s not as bad as originally predicted” and that “our health care system seems to be handling it better than expected”.

I realize now, those people are reporting from “the outside” and I’m in the eye of the storm. So let me give a different weather report.

Hospitals seem to be just maxed out, here on Long Island. By that I mean from talking to doctors, nurses and PAs who I know, that quality of care is still high in most places. But everyone is stressed and working lots of hours and getting short on PPE supplies, so for how long can they keep this up? I almost wish I’d gotten CoViD-19 already, so that I could atleast have ensured I received the maximum medical attention. I doubt that’s gonna be possible if the next two weeks are as bad as Cuomo and Fauci say that they will be. I actually had a respiratory infection/light flu in March already, but no one would test me for CoronaVirus at the time, so I have no way of knowing if I have antibodies, and Ive been living with my older parents. My mom is a cancer survivor and my dad smokes and has COPD. My brother lives alone in Queens, where the virus is running rampant according to cops my friend knows. So we can’t figure out if my brother is safer there or here, as our town has one of the highest infection rates in Nassau county. My mom says she is keeping us separate, because one of her children have to survive. And we are all playing the odds.

In the midst of this, I have never been so proud of each person in my family. My brother is a musician who is encouraging his music students with inspiring recordings that are truly healing. My father shared our meager mask supplies with our next door neighbors whose children are all first responders. My mom has mobilized us to spring clean the whole house – she never lets a crisis go to waste. We’ve all been brave and afraid. Generous and stingy, Kind and snappy. But I guess that’s real courage, not the type found in tales.

Everyone around here is past the panic stage. Only we never knew there was a stage AFTER that before. It’s a sobering dread. Sitting around, waiting to discover if the grim reaper is going to pass his scythe through you, your parents, your neighbors, or not. Not knowing what to expect. That’s the scary part that eats at me, everyone was saying it was just old people who had to fear this virus in the beginning, but now no one can say for sure it WON’T be you. It’s not the fear of dying. It’s that I don’t know what is coming, and so I can’t prepare myself for it. Will I be like my brother’s young friend with no health problems who is now on a ventilator? Will my family be like my friend’s family in Queens, with one parent in the hospital, one home and struggling, and a disabled daughter who is asymptomatic? What about the 30 year old New Jersey special Ed. Teacher whose wife found him dead in his bed at 6am? It seems like young people with no health problems are more likely to die at home, because when they are examined at the hospital they look strong and unlikely to take a turn for the worst – until they do, and fast.

Hospitals in New York City are clearly in more dire straits. I feel like all the police officers, jails, doctors, hospitals, firefighters, EMTs in New York City have long been used to patch the cracks in our City that people in charge just wanted to ignore: homeless, addiction, mental illness, broken homes, child abuse, you name it. And here comes CoViD-19 like a hammer to shatter us apart. No wonder the hospitals can’t cope. A childhood friend of mine works in Corrections at Rikers Island. He says they still don’t have N95 masks for guards when they work on the quarantine bloc. And I’d read the newspaper report of the DOC Union’s complaint that their guards had no sanitizer or masks. That was made over 10 days ago. The people who think this isn’t “That bad” need to realize the CoViD-19 Hammer is coming for their cities too, to shatter their crooked infrastructure. And the faster their metro population has grown in recent decades, the less their state will be able to absorb the shock.

What would help us now? Well, a lot of us New Yorkers REALLY want our doctors and nurses to STAY HEALTHY. We want them to still be alive to treat patients when CoronaVirus comes for the rest of us. It takes 30 years to make a doctor, and not everyone is the right raw material. So supplies for them would be great. I’d be ashamed to have them take care of me, if we can’t take care of them.

We also REALLY need that Antibody test so we know who has become immune. Not just so we can go back to work, but so we can take the risks uninfected people can’t.

I can only speak for myself, but what’s really been encouraging for me is reading about all the scrappy inventions people are making to solve problems. It makes me think starting a new career after injury might just be possible in this climate. You no longer have to be perfect, you just have to put forth a solution. I no longer feel like a fish out of water, exactly. No one is “qualified” to invent something that’s never been thought of before, or even needed before. So we will all be starting from scratch – together.

From Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania:



Thank you for your early warnings about this virus – thanks to you, we were prepared when the initial rush of panic buying emptied the grocery shelves, and we’re feeling as prepared as we can be for whatever comes next. And thank you for your continued compassionate, insightful coverage of the crisis.


As you know, my wife has neuroendocrine cancer. Fortunately, it has not progressed in the last three years, and she does not have a compromised immune system at the moment. She does get fatigued easily; and with our 5-year-old and our 6-year-old home from school, and an 8-month-old baby who is just about to start crawling, we’re exhausted. On top of that I’m currently serving as assistant chaplain and teaching two theology courses at my college. I also chair the teaching committee, where we’ve been doing what we can to support faculty moving online with hardly any time to prepare. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard, and I know it’s nothing compared to what so many others are doing right now.


I’ve faced crises before, but never one that has the unique factors this one does that make it so easy to get sucked into bad habits: overconsumption of news and social media, petty arguments, stress eating, etc. I’m finding it hard to hold onto the steady confidence in the Lord that I know I need if I’m going to care for my family and my community well.


On Wednesday morning in our family worship we read the Parable of the House on the Rock from Matthew 7:24-27. I was struck by the imagery, and afterward a poem came to me – which is strange, since I haven’t written a poem in probably more than ten years. Here’s the poem, for what it’s worth:


Shelter in Place


The tidal wave is cresting,


and those of us with half-built houses


on the rock are eyeing the sandy shore,


considering a scrabble up the dunes to higher ground.


We’ll pitch a tent up there,


find a yellow raft from someone, somewhere,


ride it out a little further back and then come down


to build our houses once the storm has passed.


I’m fighting that real temptation to retreat into myself. In a way, I’m grateful that all this is happening during Lent – grateful for the liturgical reminders that this has always been the way of the things in chaotic times. And I’m grateful for the knowledge that despite it all, He keeps on rising on Easter morning.



From Virginia:


Our church in downtown dc is making a real effort to keep everyone connected.  This week everyone received a Holy Week box with a Palm, candle, the Palm Sunday liturgy and reflections/ideas for every day of the week.  I particularly like the idea to “strip” your desk on Thursday evening to mirror the stripping of the altar.



 


From suburban Chicago:



The economic and physical toll of the pandemic have become obvious but over the last few days I have had some thoughts on additional consequences that we may see down the road.  Probably will not be good for our society and culture.

My first insight came the other night when my wife of 44 years and I had a good old fashioned yelling match when we got irritated at each other.  I know in many households this would be nothing new but in ours it was.  After the dust settled and we both apologized, we realized that we could not remember the last time that happened – it was literally years ago.  I guess being cooped up and having all of the other stresses in our lives pushed us over a line.  Our marriage is plenty strong and will readily survive but I started thinking about how many marriages and other family relationships may not.   Could become a serious issue when laid on top of the economic impact.

In  a related mental health note, I have noticed that my very minor OCD characteristics (who would step on a crack in the sidewalk if they didn’t have to?) have become stronger including my up-until-now harmless and mild germophobia.  I realized that mental and emotional heath issues have rightly taken something of a back seat these last few weeks.  But we all know they haven’t gone away.

Finally, I take a one hour walk every day.  There has developed amongst us walkers something of a social distancing dance.   The criss-crossing of streets can be somewhat comical at times but I have realized that there is also a somewhat fearful undercurrent to our nods and hellos.  Bottom line is the YOU might be dangerous for ME.  Will this “distancing” disappear once this is over.  I sure hope so.

On the plus side I continue to see spiritual growth for myself and others.  This we hope will continue.

From the Northeast:



Now that we are deep into this pandemic, it’s shocking to see how daily life has become so disrupted. It seems I’m hearing Emergency vehicle sirens all the time now, far more than before. Everyone walks around with their faces covered. They wear protective gloves. Businesses have been advertising social distancing requirements for some time now.

Outside of sweeping the sidewalk, putting out the garbage, and checking the mail, I go outside into the neighborhood once or twice per week, and only for essentials.

Stores that used to be open regularly have been shut since mid March, including a local laundromat. A dry cleaners that was closed has since reopened, but they permit only one customer at a time, and only if the person comes in wearing a face covering.

A local pharmacy has lots of empty shelves, similar to a number of the supermarkets. The pharmacy staff are all wearing masks and gloves. There are protective shields over the counters.

A local supermarket only permits five people to enter at a time. They must finish their shopping within ten minutes so that other customers might shop as well. All others who are waiting stand outside with the requisite six feet between them and everyone else.

The buses and trains have seen their ridership tank. No one wants to take public transportation if they don’t have to. If you didn’t set up your regularly scheduled doctors’ appointments before mid March, you were out of luck. Not only were they canceled, but nobody wants to go to a doctor’s office or hospital if it isn’t essential.

The churches are still closed, so of course, the usual rituals of Sunday service and Eucharistic visitors for the homebound have ended. A local Catholic church typically offered Reconciliation during Holy Week, along with the typical services of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Of course, none of these will occur.

Someone mentioned on Twitter that when the Easter season arrives, it will be like Lent never ended. I agree with that.

From Washington state:


So many of your readers are thoughtful, inspiring writers. I have no uplifting thoughts to share, only straight up diary recordings.


I noticed the coronavirus news early. My oldest son (25) was traveling in Scotland when I heard that Washingtons’ patient zero traveled through SeaTac international terminal the same day as my son. I started following talk on Tripadvisor, then Twitter and YouTube. Dr. John Campbell is a great teacher!


By early February I was worried because my wandering son was planning to visit Spain in May, then my parents (late 70’s) would travel to meet up with him in Italy. I asked them all to delay purchasing tickets. I started picking up extra supplies with each shopping trip.


We have dear friends in northern Italy who have been sheltering in place since late February. They are grieving for their community and their country. They cope by staying in touch with loved ones via Facebook. He plays guitar for us via video and She bakes and now is sewing masks. One highlight was when US Air Force service members stationed in the area came by to check on the neighborhood, taking requests for needed supplies or medications, then delivering. Our friend was so happy to receive American Oreos! (so much sweeter than European Oreos!). The airmen returned later and delivered needed medication from the pharmacy. Our friend wrote “Big jeep, wow. I love America and Americans. They says if you need help, we are ready to help.” “They are very kind with us. Thank you to your people, they always helped us.”


Rod, when you started writing about COVID-19, I remember thinking “It’s about time! Where have you been, dude?” Wyoming Doc confirmed what I was hearing from my other sources. My family started paying attention more too. Then of course, the crazy run on the stores when WA schools were closed on March 12. In spite of all this foreknowing, I still didn’t prepare well enough. I forgot to stock up on tomato sauce! Frankly, I have a good imagination for worst case scenarios but I never imagined any of this.


My oldest son is a valet at a local casino, a petri-dish of germs and exposure. He worked until the casino closed March 16 per order from our Governor (our Stay-at-Home order was today extended to May 4th). He is content to keep his socializing online, his main excursions are to the forests and foothills of our wilderness areas nearby, or late night wanders through our small town.


My parents have been cloistered at home for all of March because of a bad colds. Thank God! Mid-March they agreed to let me do their shopping and completely avoid outings. We talk on the phone every day and our family shares jokes, tips, checks on each other regularly via Messenger group. Their evangelical church is offering Sunday service online. Their neighbor has chickens and has been sharing eggs with them.


My husband was exposed the longest. His work (electrical construction design) is considered “essential” due to public works contracts. “Luckily” he is a cancer survivor and he got a sore throat and spiked a low fever last week so he received permission to work from home and it’s successful so far. His co-workers are still at the office sharing air in an open floor of upscale cubicles.


I work part time at a local university. All but essential staff (security, fac ops, IT) are working from home and classes are online. Most of my work was already web-based so my biggest challenge is learning Zoom. A hiring freeze was just announced so state institutions are preparing for financial challenges.


I have been enjoying the stay-at-home a bit too much. I love having my family around the house, working a little, doing some chores, taking a nap, going for a walk, etc. We are still able to earn income so that isn’t a fear yet. We’ve ordered take-out from favorite restaurants a couple times, thinking I should buy an electronic gift-card from a favorite coffee shop.


I had the same low fever about four days after my husband. We’re having an infrequent light cough, stuffed ears. Praying that’s all we have to worry about. Yesterday I saw a neighbor gal with 3 small children caught in a sudden hailstorm. I ran an umbrella out to her and later panicked that I touched the handle with bare hands.


Our greatest grief, thus far, has been our separation from our youngest son (22). He is a US Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton. He was supposed to come home next week for pre-deployment leave before heading to Japan (and a ship). Leave was canceled, as it should be. Quickly I realized that we should not travel to CA to visit him either. Some people questioned why deployments would continue, but it’s only fair…there are units who have been deployed for months and their families are waiting for them to come home. It’s time for our unit to take their place. Now there is a 60 day freeze on military movement so we’ll see what happens. Semper Gumby everyone! I hope to see my son next Christmas. I hope we are all here for him to see.


Here’s my one sobering insight…my oldest son wryly refers to this as the plague, the apocalypse (movie version), but I just realized that one of his earliest memories is of 9/11. He remembers seeing people jumping from the burning towers. His whole life has been bookended by unimaginable and horrible realities.


Second sobering thought…if I let my greatest fearful imaginings run wild (beyond losing family members)…the only reason my Marine would extend his enlistment would be to go to war and this is the perfect opportunity for some bad players to take advantage of the vulnerable status of so many nations. My gut reaction tonight is to blast them to hell, no mercy, no negotiating or peace-making, no American lives expended, no nation-building, just bomb them to oblivion (hmm, let me tell you how I really feel and reveal how deep my fear really is! Ouch. I shouldn’t write past midnight).


Sigh.


Rod, you and your family stay well. I feel like I know you and love your family. I’m a little mix of you and Ruthie in one person….I probably think more like you but I’m the one who stayed home.


From Portland, Oregon:


I suppose I’m a ‘lurker’ on the fringes of your blog site. My friend, you’ve got to stop immersing yourself news associated with corona virus. “That way madness lies”.


Please remember spring is upon us:


PIED BEAUTY


BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS


Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.


All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.


It will get better my friend.



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Published on April 03, 2020 19:52

Captain Crozier’s Heroic Sendoff

Here’s a video of the farewell that sailors of the USS Theodore Roosevelt gave to their departing Captain, Brett Crozier. It’s really something:



Here’s another:



All hands aboard the TR Shows their support As Captin Brett “Hero” Crozier departs the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT @CNN @cnnbrk pic.twitter.com/zmyMBaYTAO


— Tatyana (@_Tatyv) April 3, 2020



Here’s why they were sending him off:



Crozier showed “poor judgment” by sending the letter by email to 20 or 30 people, acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly said, and he implied that Crozier leaked it to the San Francisco Chronicle, although he later backed away from that suggestion.


The view from his crew was considerably different, according to the videos that captured the moment he departed the ship, which is now docked in Guam.


“Now that’s how you send off one of the greatest captains you ever had … the GOAT,” a person says in one video, using the acronym for greatest of all time. “Man for the people.”


Here’s a link to the original news story, in the San Francisco Chronicle, that got Captain Crozier fired. Excerpt:


“This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do,” Crozier wrote. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”


In the four-page letter to senior military officials, Crozier said only a small contingent of infected sailors have been off-boarded. Most of the crew remain aboard the ship, where following official guidelines for 14-day quarantines and social distancing is impossible.


“Due to a warship’s inherent limitations of space, we are not doing this,” Crozier wrote. “The spread of the disease is ongoing and accelerating.”


He asked for “compliant quarantine rooms” on shore in Guam for his entire crew “as soon as possible.”


“Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure. … This is a necessary risk,” Crozier wrote. “Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.”


That man, Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, blew his own career to smithereens to get help for his sailors. I never served in the military, so maybe relieving Capt. Crozier of command was the right thing to do, for reasons that are not apparent to me. But if I were a sailor on that ship, or was related to, or in any way knew and loved a sailor on that ship, Brett Crozier would be a hero to me.


UPDATE: Apparently he is to other people. Daniel Larison has a roundup of people standing up for the cashiered skipper.


UPDATE.2: Here’s a link to a short take that argues that both Capt. Crozier and the Navy Secretary (who fired him) made the correct decision.


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Published on April 03, 2020 08:17

April 2, 2020

An Omen?

I tried to write earlier, but couldn’t focus through the mononucleosis haze. So I watched the 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report instead. It’s new on Netflix this month. Hadn’t seen it since it came out. It’s a science fiction film about a world in which three “precogs” (psychics) can foresee crimes happening before the do, and a special police unit arrests the murderers before they can kill. It’s a movie about free will and prophetic vision.


Before brushing my teeth for bed, I checked the news. More mass death worldwide. More economic devastation — maybe a new Great Depression. The world order cracking apart under the strain. The threat of civil disorder as jobless people wonder how they will eat. The federal government taking on debt that we will never be able to pay, just to keep the country from falling to pieces overnight from the economic collapse.


Will there be wars from this? Probably. The US Navy just fired the captain of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier because someone leaked his letter to his superiors begging them for help in evacuating his sailors from the virus-infected ship. The idea seems to be that the leak compromises national security; the carrier, based in the Pacific, is supposed to project US power and deter China. What happens if China decides to take advantage of America’s military reeling from this virus to go adventuring in the region?


This pandemic will not finally end, most likely, until there is a coronavirus vaccine. Who knows when that will happen? What kind of America will be left when this pandemic recedes?


So: I closed the laptop, then went to brush my teeth. I was thinking about the news I had just read, and the movie I had just seen, then I remembered the story of the torn flag. I’ve told it in this space before, but man, in light of this sudden horror that has overtaken our nation, it really stands out in a different light. Here is a story I’ve pasted in from a blog entry I made a couple of years ago. I’m reading it with new eyes today.


On the morning of September 11, 2002, I walked over to Ground Zero for the solemn observation of the anniversary. I stood on the north side of the hole, at the perimeter, waiting for the service to start. The crowd was behind a fence; none of us had access to the site itself, which was reserved for families and dignitaries. It was important, though, to be there.


Suddenly, at the time when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, a powerful wind descended from the same direction of that plane. It was from Hurricane Gustav, which had come ashore in the Carolinas, and was rolling up the East Coast. Still, I was there, and the timing was very, very weird. It blew a fairly steady 60 mph all morning. A friend who had been watching the services live on TV said that one of the commenters called the wind “Biblical.” If you were down there in that wind, as I was, it seemed apt.


The wind was still blowing later that morning when I went into Trinity Church Wall Street for a memorial service celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. At some point during the church service, we could hear a signal from adjacent Ground Zero, indicating that all the names of the dead had been read, and that the ceremony there was ending. Shortly after, the church liturgy ended, and I emerged outside to calm. The winds had stopped. I don’t know when the ceased to blow, but I can tell you it was in the relatively short time between the start and end of the church service.


If I had to bet money, I’d say that the winds stopped blowing when the last names were read at Ground Zero. It was that kind of morning.


Later in the day, I received a call from a friend I had run into at Ground Zero that morning. She was fairly freaked out, and asked me to come over at once. I made my way to her apartment. She led me into her tiny home office, and showed me a small American flag, so old and threadbare that you could see through it, framed and under glass, hanging on her wall. A tear ran through it, almost from top to bottom.


It wasn’t obvious to me what the issue was. Then she told me: she’s had that flag on the wall for years, and it was fine. It was position right across from her desk. She looked at it every day. But that morning — September 11, 2002 — while she was out in the crowd at Ground Zero, something happened to it. It had torn down the middle, even though it was sealed under glass, and nobody had come into her home.


This really did happen. I have lost contact with that friend, but I wonder what she thinks of it today. Both of us are believing Christians, and we could not help seeing it in light of the Biblical account of the tearing of the veil in the Temple when Jesus died on the Cross. That event has multiple meanings in Christian belief, and among them is a prophecy of the ultimate destruction of the Temple itself, which took place at the hands of the Romans in 70 AD. I left my friend’s apartment wondering if the tearing of the flag — assuming that there was symbolic meaning behind it — meant that there was a withdrawal of God’s favor on the US, and that 9/11 was the beginning of our end.


Granted, I have an apocalyptic mindset, and even if I didn’t, it was very easy to think in apocalyptic terms in those days, living so close to Ground Zero. On the other hand, I was also primed to think that 9/11 was going to summon up the strength of our great nation, and goad us to assert ourselves on the world stage. The United States was at that moment the sole hyperpower on the planet. We were at the peak of our strength. We would soon be going to war in the Middle East, that was clear by then. Now, finally, we would set the world to right. I was not eager to believe in portents that cast doubt on that project. I was in those days filled with patriotic righteousness — which is why the tearing of the flag was so eerie, and unwelcome to me.


That’s what I saw on 9/11/2002. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe that flag had come apart earlier, and my friend only noticed it on that morning. But: in light of everything that has happened since then — and that continues to happen — that torn flag seems to me like the omen I feared it was at the time.


Maybe it was meaningless. Seems less so today, though. Make of it what you will. I mean, look, the wind was not something magical — it was from Hurricane Erin, far offshore, though it just happened to start blowing at that precise time, and to stop very close to the time that the ritual reading of the names stopped. And my friend, who was visibly distressed when I arrived at her apartment, had either just that afternoon noticed a dramatic tear in a flag that had been ripped for some time, or that flag had somehow fallen apart that morning, even though it was under glass in a sealed frame.


Like I said, make of it what you will. We will never really know if it was a coincidence, or a meaningful coincidence. No question, though, but that the United States has not had a good 21st century — and it just got unimaginably worse.


Question to the room: have you ever had precognition of the future, or witnessed something you consider to have been a portent, a sign of things to come? If so, tell the story.


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Published on April 02, 2020 23:01

Pandemic Diaries 17

Hello all. This was a lousy day. My relapse of Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) put me in bed for the entire afternoon. What a strange disease — one that leaves you feeling exhausted after sleeping for five hours. It also makes me foggy sometimes. I worked for hours on a post about the Viktor Orban situation in Hungary, but I haven’t yet finished it because I really want to get this right, but it’s hard to focus. I apologize for not approving comments all day, either. I’ll get to them tonight.


Above is a photo of my wife and daughter watching a movie in our side yard. Nora, my kid, put a bedsheet on the wall, and got a projector. She and her mom are out there watching “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” on a picnic blanket. Girls know how to stay at home, apparently.


How’s it going with you all? Let’s check in.


From Connecticut:


During these challenging times, I am keenly aware of the intersection of my past with these times, dreams past and current realities, but hope most of all . I too dreamt the American Dream: white picket fence, garden, children. In the words of my uncle Jack, “one wife, one job, one home.” Jack worked as a lineman for Bell Telephone. Lived his last days in a doublewide, one of the first featured in Life magazine. In private the family mocked him for his choice. P.S. He left the church close to a million dollars when he died. Uncle Jack Visited his wife in a nursing home daily until her death. Took his mentally ill sister under his wing, a promise he made to his father on his dad’s deathbed, Visited his mother most day during his lunch break. A small compartment built into the wall of his bedroom where holy water was kept in case of need by a priest. A few years ago, desperately wanting to hear the family stories and understand the dark threads which ran generationally through my family, I flew from Connecticut to San Jose to try to make sense of my deeply fractured family, rife with depression –a high gloss white medicine cabinet — as if white became black — from which my mother drew meds to keep her going, to keep her after my father died at 44 leaving leaving her at 38 with five children, no skills and two in diapers. Far away from the bucolic country side of Connecticut. My past followed me. The good, the bad and the indifferent. Raised in the Catholic Church I lived in mortal fear of hell. Through no fault of the Catholic church I had not heard the good news. heard only the rules. if my classmates could not find me the confessional line was a safe bet. What kept me when nothing else did? Awe and wonder in the presence of majesty, sanctity and holiness of the sacraments and liturgy which while I did not understand…. perhaps it was not understanding which helped to keep me. It was Mystery.


Several days after I began writing this, my adult son, husband, I fell ill with the virus. I am writing from my bed. My husband presented with one set of symptoms, middle of the night cough which shook our bed. He went by ambulance to the hospital, was prescribe an inhaler and sent home. Returned today to stand in a long line to be tested at that same hospital. My adult son and I presented with a different set of symptoms: excruciating headaches, aches, fever, chills and gastro. What I had dismissed as flu for my son, allergies for me, these differences were explained by my doctor as variations of the virus. We are not, as of yet anyway, in spite of the endless stream of terrifying images, in spite of our worst fears, not gasping for air. (p.s my husband is 83).


For the past two years My husband and I along with one of our sons have prepared our home to sell in a growing competitive housing market. We planned to list on April 1! So much for that plan. To remain in this house, which we may have to do–housing market bad enough before the pandemic–we will have to consider renting out bedrooms.


I grew up In Tulsa, Oklahoma in a neighborhood where, in the words of one of those neighbor, “We borrow everything from each other except for our husbands. However, as necessary, even them.” I lived in that neighbor’s back yard, stocked with a playhouse, monkey bars, swings. That one woman’s back yard was my childhood. I played from early morning until dinner then back out until called inside from this neighbors’ yard. One year her Christmas card suggested singing John 3:16 to the tune of Silent Night.


My husband and I, along with tremendous help from our oldest son, have spent the last two years preparing our home to sell, The housing market bottomed before the pandemic. Will it go lower? We had planned to list the house April 1. My self-employed husband works full time. When he lost his corporate job he began his own business, something he had always wanted to do. He earned $30,000 the first year. Our family of five did not go hungry thanks to our community of friends who sent anonymous checks. We did not go hungry. If and when we do sell the house we will have to live on what we make on the house. Our adult children live close by and my husband, assuming he still has a job, covers the tri-state. We are tied to this area. How long can he work? where will we go? If we must stay we will have to find a way. Tenants? Maybe. whatever it takes.


My daughter lives in Hoboken New Jersey, works in Manhattan for a non profit. As membership director of the company as well as collector of monthly fees she is the only one in the company bringing in money. There is enough payroll for the next two months.


My family has experienced our share of heartache and loss, illness, broken familial relationships, addiction, and generational mental illness. I cannot help but believe it was those Godly models, “cloud of witnesses,” neighbor, Bible study teachers– one a funky self -taught Brethren, who without benefit of notes, opened and taught straight from her black used King James, no “processed food from Isabell and friends who became my cherished family. Manifestations of God’s grace. Grace which I came to understand through Martin Luther himself a victim of Scrupulosity (a form of OCD) speaking, imagine, all these centuries later, to a fellow sinner and scrupe like me.


It is as if the world we once knew has been ripped into a million pieces and thrown out the window as confetti on a parade of fallen pride. God spreads grace like a five year old spreads peanut butter. I am counting on that.


From Albuquerque, New Mexico:


We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The officials here, especially the Governor, have been relatively aggressive in imposing restrictions. The statewide closure of non-essential businesses and stay-at-home measures came on March 23, just days after similar measures in New York. At the time, New York had about 15 times as many cases per million residents as New Mexico.


We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The officials here, especially the Governor, have been relatively aggressive in imposing restrictions. The statewide closure of non-essential businesses and stay-at-home measures came on March 23, just days after similar measures in New York. At the time, New York had about 15 times as many cases per million residents as New Mexico.


On one hand, the fact that our state is moving comparatively quickly gives me hope that our state may suffer less. On the other hand, I am very concerned by the swift neutering of our civil liberties and the economic impact of widespread closures. New Mexico is a petroleum state, highly dependent on oil and gas for state tax revenues, and the recent drop in oil prices is going to devastate the state budget. Combined with the impact of the pandemic, our state is going to be serious economic distress in in the coming months and years.


My family and I have been very fortunate that our circumstances are allowing us to weather this storm. I am an attorney and sole practitioner, without any employees. I don’t have to make payroll or lay anyone off. My practice, representing plaintiffs in injury and insurance matters, is a type where it’s normal to go several months without revenue, and I happened to have had a very lucrative first quarter.


Even before the crisis, my practice was cloud-based, with all files digital and synced to my cloud provider. My full transition to working from home took about 20 minutes. With schools closed, my wife, a teacher, has been able to watch the kids full time.


We are members of an Episcopal church, one of the few in the nation that is growing rather than shrinking, with lots of young families. Our clergy have been extraordinary in creating streaming services and activities, not just on Sunday mornings, but throughout the week. I am a member of the vestry, and we conducted last month’s meeting through Zoom.


I am working to remain humbly grateful for our circumstances and keeping perspective on the inconveniences, knowing what so many are facing today. Your pandemic diaries have been an invaluable aid in this respect.


From Indianapolis:


(Rod, below is a letter I wrote to “Jim”—a fellow congregant of a local Indianapolis Lutheran Church. I had become seriously ill on St. Valentine’s Day and spent nearly four weeks in the hospital. Talk about being a “health compromised” individual! During this entire time, the dreaded coronavirus was a distinct possibility for me. Either I already had the disease or (if not) it posed a very real threat to my life. Now I am comfortably situated in my bedroom and family member keep their distance. I am 66 years old and not nearly as resilient as had been as a young man. Under the right circumstances, the corona virus could kill me. We are not taking any chances to find out one way or another.)


Jim:


One interesting little bit of information gathered from a blood draw during my most recent adventure in the hospital is that I have an A1C of 5.9. 5.9 is ever close to a perfect blood sugar balance as one might get. How this occurred is a mystery to me. As Linda has noted, I have taken to eating cookies by the bucketful. I thought my A1C would have been terrible not so much for the cookies but really for the general turmoil in my health these past few months. So, what do I know about medicine?


I collapsed in the shower on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day. I have no memory of the incident.


One week later, I was admitted into Community Rehab hospital straight from Community East. I was going to be there for two weeks and so I was quite downhearted about my circumstances. Not that what needed to be done would be too difficult. Not that the people were awful. The nurses and therapists were all wonderful. (My shapely and easy on the eyes occupational and physical therapists are two of my favorite people in the world.) No. None of that. The fact was I was going to be away from my family and home.


My record collection wasn’t there. Nor my books. On no account would they allow me to smoke my pipes. They were even stingy in regard to my beloved Diet Coke. But I’d miss Linda most of all. Linda and I have been an “item” since our junior year of high school (1970). We rarely have been apart. Some people think I am missing something in life when I say Linda is my very best friend; but it is all true—Linda is the best thing that ever happened to me. Knowing it was going to be an additional fourteen days before we be together again was a bit dismaying.


A couple of days into my rehab stay, I took a look at the calendar on my laptop and suddenly realized there was an entire week I could not account for. It turns out I have absolutely no memory of that first week. Now Linda has told me of all the events of that week, and I tell you it sounds quite horrifying. I was on a ventilator for two days. At one point, the doctors told Linda she could not go home for the night because there may be “life issues” that might have to be faced that night. Apparently, once I woke up, I was a real terror. I would argue with anyone about anything. Hardly my normal sweet, charming self.


Linda thinks I should be glad I don’t remember that week.


The end of that story is my doctors concluded I had some sort of heart attack and that is why I collapsed in the bathroom.


I was discharged Friday, March 6th. I was one cheerful guy. It was so wonderful to be home. Things settled into my usual routines. Life is good!!! It was then on Wednesday, March 18th, that I had just finished up my usual office tasks. I climbed the first set of stairs to the main floor of our house. Reaching that main floor, I noted to myself that that climb was harder than it should have been. I felt weak and tired. So, I decided to rest for a while and then make that next climb. I covered myself with a blanket and promptly fell asleep.


A few hours later, Linda and Erin grew concerned. Erin took my temperature. It was 105. ER time!


I was greeted in the ER by nurses and doctors all wearing masks and protective gear. The Corona virus had raised its ugly head and everyone coming into the hospital were to be treated as potential carriers. In time, they took me up to a patient room in the oncology wing. The oncology wing being where they were putting all suspected corona suffers. They did the corona virus test on me; but said it was hard knowing when they’d get the results. Could be four days. Could be four weeks.


My fever broke during my stay in the ER; I felt quite better. So, I wanted to go home. My doctor strongly advised against it. I eventually conceded to her advice and agreed to stay; but I clearly indicated my unhappiness with the situation. I have already spent a month in the hospital in 2020 and I had had enough.


Thursday and Friday passed painfully slow. Aside from the cascade of nurses and doctors who poked their noses into my room, there was little for me to do except watch television. (And, yes, daytime TV is as bad as everyone says it is.) Taking my vitals, drawing my blood, and being asked the same questions over and over again were all that broke up the long stretches of empty time. And then came Saturday.


The morning came as it had all the days before. Blood draws. Taking of vitals. Being asked “when was the last time you took a crap?” A small breakfast. Merciful heavens! When I was finally left alone, I began to plan out what to watch on television for the day—a dismal project. At about 9.00a, my primary doctor came in my room and said: “Mr. Dooley, I am determined to get on your good side today. How would you feel about being discharged from the hospital today?”


I had no signs of having the corona virus. Looking at the patterns of the illness in other parts of the world, the hospital was anticipating a huge wave of persons truly sick from the virus in the coming week. They were going to need my bed. I just had to self-isolate once at home.


“I can go for that!”


Linda came and took me home. A big stack of mail was waiting for me; but now was the time for sweet, peaceful sleep. Oh, how great it was to sleep for ten uninterrupted hours.


So, here I am. I have my music and books. Plenty of engaging time to read and write. I am so grateful to be home—even though I have largely confined myself to our bedroom and bathroom. Linda, Erin, Liam and Ellie largely keep their distance for fear they might transfer dome random bug to their “wellness-compromised” family member.


Linda has absolutely forbidden any pipe smoking in our bedroom; so that part has yet to be fulfilled. Many would say “good”. Oh, well. I remain very happy to be home. The cherry on top of this Ice-cream sundae: the hospital called me Monday to tell me my corona virus test came out negative. I do not have or had the corona virus. At least that bullet missed me!


I am not happy when I remind myself that I haven’t seen the inside of Servants of Christ since last August. Yeah, you can watch services online, but it is not the same. Can’t partake of the sacrament. And I miss the people.


Here’s to prayers for healing for me and all suffering under pain and illness. I am thankful for all the prayers given by our SOC family.


Well….probably more than you care to know! Hope all is well for you and yours. Hope all is well for our larger SOC Lutheran family. Please keep in touch.


Yours in Christ,

Mike


From New Jersey:


I’m writing from Northern New Jersey. I live a county away from Bergen, the hardest hit county in the our state. I’m 23, in reasonably good health and shape, but I do have asthma. However, my brother has severe autism and epilepsy, and with the amount of medication he is on, his immune system would likely be unable to combat coronavirus. Furthermore, the hospitals won’t let the family in the hospital to help him be treated; this is the nightmare scenario for our family. So needless to say we are very nervous and taking all the precautions necessary to prevent bringing the virus home. To any other readers who have disabled family members at home that you’re concerned about, I feel for you immensely, and remind you to seek solace and clarity in God and the strengths of your family and friends. That’s how I keep my sanity, though I am not sure how much sanity I will have left when all is said and done.


I’m also currently a college student (I took a 2-year interregnum from college to help care for my brother, and this is the first semester I’ve been back. What a way to continue your education, in the middle of a pandemic). So I fortunately and unfortunately don’t have a job to lose. However, I was banking on working 2 jobs over the summer to pay for school in the fall, so we’ll see how bad this really gets and how long “non-essential” NJ businesses remain closed. Currently my sister and my dad are “essential” employees, but my sister can’t work from home. Fortunately she does pharmaceutical research and is wearing PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) every day, at all times. There are many families in worse situations with people working hospitality or food service, so my prayers go to them.


I am a recent convert to Catholicism, with the help of several friends. Fitting that I was able to find God on the eve of the pandemic, is it not? So I don’t wish to speak with any authority on what “Christians” should be doing or will do. But what I will say is that as a Christian, as long as we nurture our own hearts and our connection to God, and model that for others, and do our charitable works, then we have done all we can to help shape our communities in this time of strife. Rod I hope you get better, and I cannot thank you enough for the content you create. Stay safe and be healthy sir.


Thank you, dear people. Please keep sending in your diaries. I’m at rod – at – amconmag – dot – com. Please put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to say from where you write.


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Published on April 02, 2020 19:10

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