Thomas Merton on the miseries of travelling with his family . . .
Perhaps the worst day of all was the day we climbed the Jungfrau--in a train. All the way up I was arguing with Pop, who thought we were being cheated, for he contended that the Jungfrau was not nearly so high as all the other mountains around us, and he had embarked on the excursion on the more or less tacit assumption that the Jungfrau was the highest mountain around these parts: and now look, the Eiger and the Monch were much higher! I was vehement in explaining that the Jungfrau looked lower because it was further away, but Pop did not believe in my theory of perspective.
By the time we got to the Jungfrau joch, everybody was ready to fall down from nervous exhaustion, and the height made Bonnemaman faint, and Pop began to feel sick, and I had a big crisis of tears in the dining room, and then when Father and I and John Paul walked out into the blinding white-snow field without dark glasses we all got headaches, and so the day, as a whole, was completely horrible.
Then, in Interlaken, although Pop and Bonnemaman had the intense consolation of being able to occupy the same rooms that had been used only a few months before by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, John Paul humiliated the whole family by falling fully dressed into a pond full of gold-fish and running though the hotel dripping with water and green-weeds. Finally, we were all scared out of our wits when one of the maids, exhausted by the strain of waiting on so many hundreds of English and American tourists, fainted while carrying a loaded tray, and crashed to the floor in a tornado of dishes right behind my chair.
We were glad to get out of Switzerland, and back into France, but by the time reached Avignon, I had developed such a disgust for sightseeing that I would not leave the hotel to go and see the Palace of the Popes. I remained in the room and read Tarzan of the Apes, finishing the whole book before Father and John Paul returned from what was probably the only really interesting thing we had struck in the whole miserable journey.
People in close proximity to each other can get on each other's nerves. Thomas Merton learns this the hard way--travelling through Switzerland with his grandfather and grandmother and little brother. They argue. Get sick. Humiliated. Exhausted. Being that close to each other, with no escape, can drive a person to a little Edgar Rice Burroughs. Escape comes in many forms. Merton chooses literature.
I have had quite the day of busyness. In this time of pandemic and mass hysteria, I went ahead today with all of my normal weekly activities. I cleaned at church. I practiced music for a Lutheran church service I'm playing for tomorrow morning. I played for Mass this afternoon. Had pizza for dinner. It was . . . normal.
Yes, the future is uncertain. More so than normal. I have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring. Or the next. Everyone seems to have lost their minds a little at the moment. We aren't confined to our homes. Yet. I can get into my car, drive to a store, and buy groceries if I need to. (Don't know what's left on the shelves at Meijer anymore, but I can still drive there and see.) There may come a time when that kind of freedom is curtailed a little. Or a lot. I don't know.
Here's the thing. I love my family. I want them safe, healthy. I would do anything to insure that, including holing up for weeks with them in my house, living on Ramen and Netflix and poetry. Would we get on each other's nerves? Most certainly. Would we yell at each other? Yup. Would I grab a book from my bookshelf--something by Dickens--and escape for a little while? Indeed. And, eventually, it would start to feel . . . normal.
I have good friends who are panicking right now, as are a lot of usually level-headed individuals. The thing that worries me about this panic is that it may start to feel normal. Living from one hysterical social media post to another. Glued to our television sets, watching a map of the United States become saturated with outbreaks of COVID-19. If any of my disciples reading this post remember the days following the 9-11 attacks in the United States, watching news reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week, became a national past time. I see the current situation quickly developing into something similar.
I have a friend whose father is a retired police detective. She told me once that one of her father's sayings is, "Safety is just a feeling." As we all sit in our homes, with our pantries full of toilet paper and pasta and Gatorade, we feel safe. Prepared. And that's good. Our families are ready for the zombie apocalypse. It provides us some peace of mind, which really is in short supply at the moment in most places.
The people we love most are the ones who can drive us most crazy, as Merton points out in the passage above. They know how to get under our skins and pluck our nerves like guitar strings. Yet, those people are the reason we work and sweat and live and die. They are what make our lives normal, however that is defined. They are the reason we panic and worry when our normal lives shift or are threatened. We want our loved ones to be safe, no matter how much they irritate us.
Here is what I have been doing to stem the wave of worry that is sweeping across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the world: every time I begin to worry, I pray instead. Worry isn't productive. It helps absolutely nothing. Prayer, on the other hand, allows me to feel as if I'm helping in some small way, instead of contributing to the national toilet paper shortage.
So, faithful disciples, huddled in your homes, waiting for the coronavirus to come knocking on your front doors, Saint Marty is praying for all of you. Wishing you good health, abundant love. Safety, in whatever form that takes.
Keep calm. Wash your hands. Check on your elderly neighbors. Pray. Be the solution, not the problem.
