June 8-9: Wile E. Coyote, Vaccines, Poem from "Kyrie"

I think there's going to be a lot written about this time of pandemic, of racial revolution.  Some of it will be good, lasting.  Most of it will probably be forgotten a couple generations from now, when the idea of the whole world just staying home seems impossible.

I don't know what kind of lessons will arise from this moment of Covid-19 and George Floyd, when everything seems on the brink of total collapse or total resurrection.  We seem to be precariously balanced between these two extremes, like Wile E. Coyote suspended in mid-air just before gravity takes over.

Yes, the virus afflicting humankind right now seems arbitrary, skipping over one person and choosing another.  And yet, the African American community has been effected more catastrophically, because of capitalism and a social class system that is designed to keep poor people poor and rich people rich.

Yesterday, I did the Bob Barker thing for my puppy.  Took her to the vet to get spayed.  She is home, resting, spaced out on the lingering effects of anesthesia and half a pain pill.  I just went to check on her.  She was nestled in my daughter's arms, paw on her chest, quietly staring up into my daughter's face.

My puppy will recover in a few days.  Be back to her normal self in a week or so.  This cocoon we've all been living in has provided me with moments like this one--reflecting on how precious each life is, from the smallest to the largest.  The stories of loss in the last few months have been plentiful--a harvest of grief.  100,000 dead and counting.  Couple that with George Floyd and the protests (a few violent, most peaceful)  that his murder has generated, and the festering wound of over 400 years of endemic racism that has been dragged out into the streets of the United States and displayed for all the world to see.

The story of this time is far from over.  The lessons are still being learned.  I truly believe that hatred and violence are never part of any solution.  Hatred and violence and willful ignorance are what got us to this point in history.  Eventually, there will be a vaccine for Covid-19.  A treatment.  And it will be love, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, that is the treatment for institutional racism.

We've all been cocooning from racism for a very long while.  Over 400 years, to be exact.  The vaccine is available, and everyone needs to get it.  We all have this virus, whether we're symptomatic or asymptomatic.  The sooner we admit this, the sooner we can start to heal.

Healing is a miracle, sometimes painful and difficult, but always beautiful.

And Saint Marty gives thanks for that.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

The bride is in the parlor, dear confection.
Down on his knee at the edge of all that white,
her father puts a penny in her shoe.

Under the stiff organza and the sash,
the first cell of her first child slips
into the chamber with a little click.

The family next door was never struck
but we lost three--was that God's will?  And which
were chosen for its purpose, us or them?

The Gospel says there is no us and them.
Science says there is no moral lesson.
The photo album says, who are these people?

After the paw withdraws, the world
hums again, making its golden honey.

June 3: Cole, A Miracle, "Dedicated"

Tonight, I'm writing about a young man whose whole life has been a miracle.

"Cole" is the nephew of one of my best friends.  He has had health struggles his entire life.  Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy, he has grown and thrived because of love.  In his young life, he has undergone over two dozen surgeries.  Without words, he communicates.  Without the ability to walk, he never slows down.  He is the anchor of his family, holding them steady with the light of his smiles.

Today, Cole was brought to the emergency room of our local hospital because he told his mother that his lungs were burning, and he was struggling for breath.  After many tests, the doctors sent him home, because his family already has a ventilator to place him on.  He's in his own bed now, surrounded by everyone who has nurtured and cared for him.  They are awaiting the results of a Covid-19 test.

I don't have to ask for a miracle for Cole.  Cole is a miracle.  What I'm asking for tonight are prayers and love for Cole.  Lift him up to whatever higher power you believe in.  Yahweh.  Jesus.  Buddha.  Mohammed.  God.  Science.  Ask for healing.  Ask for strength.  Ask for the universe to smile down on him, the way he's smiled up at the universe his whole life.  I want everyone who reads this post to be a miracle for Cole.

When my nephew, Caden, was dedicated at church as an infant, I wrote a poem for him and his parents.  I'm including that poem tonight, this time for my best friend's nephew, whose whole life has been dedicated to love.

And for that Saint Marty gives thanks.

Dedicated

by:  Martin Achatz

My daughter draws roses

Crowned with valentines,

Stems long, leafy, without thorns.

She hands me a sheet of them,

A garden bright as Christmas lights,

Cardinal red, finch gold, jay blue.

I put the picture in a book, know

Tomorrow, when I open it to read,

My daughter’s flock of blossoms

Will take flight, fill the air

With the slap of crayon hearts.

Christ, as a child, scooped clay

From the ground, molded it

Into a bird, a wren

The size of a date.  He brought

His creation to Mary and Joseph,

Caged in His ant fingers,

Released it before them.

They watched it rise into saffron

Sky, disappear like the frost of breath.

Perhaps that’s when they truly knew

He didn’t belong to them.

I want to keep my daughter’s roses

Locked deep in the bed of my chest

Where they’ll flutter like trapped sparrows.

But I have to let them go.

They don’t belong to me.

They belong to the grass, the clouds,

The pigeon-white moon,

The bright palm of the sun.

May 28: Graduation Parade, Possibility and Hope, Poem from "Kyrie"

This evening, I attended a graduation parade.  My daughter's boyfriend is part of the Class of 2020, and so I drove out to the high school, parked along the side of the road, and waited for all the seniors to come rolling by in the cars, streamers and balloons snapping, horns blazing away.

It was one of the first times since this pandemic really got serious a few months ago that I allowed myself to be part of a community event.  All the spectators stood by their cars, safely distant, and waited for their senior to drive by.  Even though I saw a few MAGA hats and a couple people simply not following the Covid-19 safety guidelines for the parade, this night wasn't about politics.  

It was about young people, smiling, laughing, waving, claiming this night as their own.  In the last three months, the Class of 2020 has faced challenges that haven't existed for close to four generations.  A global pandemic that brought school, work, scholarship applications, college visits and orientations, proms and graduation ceremonies to a complete halt.  For a while.

But tonight, the world moved forward a little.  Tonight was about young people, looking into their futures and seeing possibility and hope.  That was a miraculous thing to witness.

And Saint Marty gives thanks for that.

Poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

He planned his own service, the pine box,

the open lid, which hymns, chapter and verse,

who would pray, how long, who'd carry him out.

He wrote it all down in a fair hand,

stroking the shawl around him in his chair,

and gave away his watch, his dog, his house.

Emmett said, he'd have lain down in the grave

except he needed us to tuck him in.

He shaved each day, put on his good wool pants

chosen for the cloth and a little loose

as they lowered in another son-in-law.

Sat by the door, handrolling cigarettes

three at a time, licking down both ends,

and wheezed and coughed and spit in a rusted can.

May 19: The Point of Discovery, Hard Truths, Lilac Buds

Fourteen-year-old Merton faces some hard truths . . . 

One day I was in the deserted house all by myself with Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan (Athos being my favorite and, in a sense, the one into whom I tended to project myself).  The telephone rang.  I thought for a while of letting it ring and not answering it, but eventually I did.  It turned out to be a telegram for me.

At first, I could not make out the words, as the Scotch lady in the telegraph office was pronouncing them.  Then, when I did make them out, I did not believe them.

The message ran:  "Entering New York harbor.  All well."  And it came from Father, in the hospital, in London.  I tried to argue the woman at the other end of the wire into telling me that it came from my Uncle Harold, who had been travelling in Europe that year.  But she would not be argued into anything but what she saw right in front of her nose.  The telegram was signed Father, and it came from London.

I hung up the receiver and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.  I walked up and down in the silent and empty house.  I sat down in one of the big leather chairs in the smoking room.  There was nobody there.  There was nobody in the whole huge house.

I sat there in the dark, unhappy room, unable to think, unable to move, with all the innumerable elements of my isolation crowding in upon me from every side:  without a home, without a family, without a country, without a father, apparently without any friends, without any interior peace or confidence or light or understanding of my own--without God, too, without God, without heaven, without grace, without anything.  And what was happening to Father, there in London?  I was unable to think of it.

The first thing that Uncle Ben did when I entered the house at Ealing was to tell me the news with all the dramatic overtones he gave to his most important announcements.

His eyes widened and he stared at me and bared his great teeth, pronouncing every syllable with tremendous distinctness and emphasis, saying:  "Your father has a malignant tumor on the brain."

Father lay in a dark ward in the hospital.  He did not have much to say.  But it was not as bad as I had feared, from the telegram he had sent me.  Everything he said was lucid and intelligible and I was comforted, in the sense that a clearly apparent physiological cause seemed to me to exclude the thought of insanity in the strict sense.  Father was not out of his mind.  But you could already see the evil, swelling lump on his forehead.

He told me, weakly, that they were going to try and operate on him, but they were afraid they could not do very much.  Again he told me to pray.

I did not say anything about the telegram.

Leaving the hospital I knew what was going to happen.  He would lie there like that for another year, perhaps two or three years.  And then he would die--unless they first killed him on an operating table.

Since those days, doctors have found out that you can cut away whole sections of the brain, in these operations, and save lives and minds and all.  In 1929 they evidently did not yet know this.  It was Father's lot to die slowly and painfully in the years when the doctors were just reaching the point of the discovery.

Hard truths for a young person to face.  Merton knows he is going to lose his father in a slow, painful manner.  Regardless of Merton's assertion that "doctors have found out that you can cut away whole sections of the brain . . . and save lives and minds and all," a malignant brain tumor, even with today's medical advancements, is something that will change your life significantly.  Or end it.  I've seen this situation up close and personal.

I am not working today.  I took the rest of this week off from the medical office.  At the moment, the entire healthcare system is "ramping up" for full operations.  That means that lots and lots of people are going to be coming through our doors after almost two months of social distancing and isolation.  I decided I really didn't want to be around for that.  

Of course like young Merton, I have to face some hard truths.  I can't remain at home, socially distant, indefinitely.  Yes, I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic, and less likely to survive a bout of Covid-19.  But I also have to support my family and pay my bills.  Thus, I will return to work next week, masked and anxious.  I will wash my hands every 20 minutes, eat lunch in an office by myself, and avoid large groups of patients/coworkers as much as possible.  These will be be the hard truths of my life for quite some time.  

Truth isn't always pleasant.  It can wound and depress.  Yet, on my morning walk with my puppy today, I felt warm wind on my face, the sun on my neck, and I realized that I was having a great time.  I was listening to a good book (Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman), and I could smell summer in the air.  The lilac bushes in my backyard are getting some green buds despite a particularly punishing winter season.  Soon, my entire neighborhood will smell and be purple.  These are truths, too.

I will not be attending any parades this summer.  If there are fireworks, I probably won't be at those, either.  If you see me out and about, I will be wearing a face mask, as will the rest of my family.  Don't think I'm being an alarmist.  My truth is different than your truth.

For this afternoon, however, I am grateful for the miracle and truth of sunlight and coming-of-summer winds and lilac buds.  

For this, Saint Marty gives thanks.

April 24: Juggled, 33% Chance, Poem from "Kyrie"

It has been a long, tiring week in a succession of long, tiring weeks.

I often find myself too tired to do much of anything by the time I get home from working at the medical office, but I have other obligations at night.  Teaching.  Cleaning.  Writing.  Grading.  Fathering.  Husbanding.  I've juggled all these balls pretty well for most of my life.

Now, however, I find myself struggling.  Before I know it, I'm staring at a stack of papers or a blank computer screen at midnight, frozen and exhausted.  The stress of working in a hospital/medical office environment is draining.  Sure, there are times when I laugh and joke.  And I'm surrounded by people I care about and who care about me.  But this pandemic sort of consumes me, physically and mentally, for a good portion of every 24 hours.

I know that my story isn't any different from thousands of other stories out there.  I'm not unique.  I try to keep that in mind.  It's difficult, however, when I read statistics about how much Covid-19 affects people with diabetes.  That, if I get this virus, I stand a 33% chance of ending up on a ventilator.  Just thinking about that makes me want to wash my hands for about a half hour straight.

My great friend, Helen, said to me a couple weeks ago that she believes something good is going to come out of this pandemic.  At the time she said this to me, I had a hard time believing her statement.  But, as the shelter-in-place extends and extends, I have come to truly treasure the time I have with my family.  Long walks with my puppy.  Zoom meetings with siblings where we just eat dinner together.  These simple acts of sharing have become serenity in the middle of a chaotic time.

Tonight, I am giving thanks for these small moments of joy.  They sustain me.  Give me hope.

They allow Saint Marty to continue juggling for another day.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

All day, one room:  me, and the cherubim
with their wet kisses.  Without quarantines,
who knew what was happening at home--
was someone put to bed, had someone died?
The paper said how dangerous, they coughed
and snuffed in the double desks, facing me--
they sneezed and spit on books we passed around
and on the boots I tied, retied, barely
out of school myself, Price, at the front--
they smeared their lunch, they had no handkerchiefs,
no fresh water to wash my hands--when the youngest
started to cry, flushed and scared,
I just couldn't touch her, I let her cry.
Their teacher, and I let them cry.

April 1, 2, 3, 4: Grace Within, Paul Lynde, Plague of Locusts

Merton talking about some good people . . .

The Auvergnats are, as a rule, not tall.  The Privats were both of them not much taller than I was, being then twelve, but tall for my age.  I suppose M. Privat was about five foot three or four, but not more.  But he was tremendously broad, a man of great strength.  He seemed to have no neck, but his head rose from his shoulders in a solid column of muscle and bone, and for the rest, his shadow was almost completely square.  He wore a black broad-brimmed hat, like most of the peasants of the region, and it gave his face an added solemnity when his sober and judicious eyes looked out at you peacefully from under the regular brows and that regular brim above them.,  These two decks, two levels of regularity, added much to the impression of solidity and immobility and impassiveness which he carried with him everywhere, whether at work or at rest.  

His little wife was more like a bird, thin, serious, earnest, quick, but also full of the peacefulness and impassiveness which, as I now know, came from living close to God.  She wore a funny little headdress which I find it almost impossible to describe, except to say that it looked like a little sugar-loaf perched on top of her head, and garnished with a bit of black lace.  The women of Auvergne still wear that headdress.

It is a great pleasure for me to remember such good and kind people and to talk about them, although I no longer possess any details about them.  I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity.  They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints.  And they were saints in the most effective and telling way:  sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.

Their farm, their family, and their Church were all that occupied these good souls, and their lives were full.

Father, who thought more and more of my physical and moral health, realized what a treasure he had found in these two, and consequently Murat was more and more in his mind as a place where I should go and get healthy.

That winter, at the Lycee, I had spent several weeks in the infirmary with various fevers, and the following summer, when Father had to go to Paris, he took the opportunity to send me once again to Murat to spend a few weeks with the Privats, who would feed me plenty of butter and milk and would take care of me in a every possible way.

Merton obviously cares a great deal for the Privats.  They are ordinary people leading ordinary lives in an extraordinary way, full or grace and love and compassion.  They obviously make a strong impression on twelve-year-old Thomas Merton, who recognizes their "deep faith and charity."  Perhaps, the seed of the future Trappist monk is planted here by this humble French couple.

I have to say that I have always been blessed by having good people in my life.  Friends who've carried me through some of the worst times in my life.  Filled my cupboards with food when I couldn't afford to buy groceries.  Bought me lunch when my life was falling apart.  Sat and listened to my problems without judgment.  Gave me advice when I needed it.  And just loved me despite of my messy, broken life.

In the current pandemic, shelter-in-place world, I miss these good people in my life.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, I have been teaching my university classes online, including Zoom meetings with my students.  At first weirdly awkward, these class sessions have come to feel "normal" in a way.  I don't know if that's a good thing.  Instead of being self-conscious, I now simply set aside the feeling that I am sitting next to Paul Lynde in Hollywood Squares.  I allow myself to be myself.

So, when it came time for my monthly poetry workshop, I decided to try a virtual experiment.  I, and seven of the best people I know, gathered online at 7 p.m. Thursday night for some writing and sharing.  As each person entered the meeting, it was like greeting someone coming home from a war.  We yelled out their names, like incantations them magically appear.

We talked and wrote and shared for about two-and-a-half hours.  It was wonderful to be in the presence of these really good people.  I told one of them later in a phone text that I entered the evening with an empty cup, and I left full to the brim.  It was a night that I really needed, after dealing with the reality of Covid-19 on a daily basis at work for three weeks straight.

That is what this time has created--moments when you realize just how much has been stripped away from you.  And what is really important.  I have been holding these monthly poetry jam sessions for over three years.  In the process, I found a family of poets.  Wonderful friends, every last one of them.  And I got to spend about 150 virtual minutes with them this week.

They are all healthy and safe.  And they were all ready to write and share.  As the old saying goes, pressure creates diamonds.  That night was a diamond for me.  Something beautiful in a dark moment in history.  I have been living in the light of those couple hours ever since. 

And then last night, out of the blue, I received a FaceTime call from one of my best friends.  We spoke for over an hour.  He's a pastor at a church downstate, and we hadn't spoken in a really long time.  "Why does it take a global pandemic to get us to talk?" my friend asked.  We laughed and talked about our kids and pets and jobs.  It was as if we were picking up the thread of a conversation we had started that afternoon. 

So, I have been blessed with poetry and friends these first few days of April.  People who bring love and joy into my existence.  That is something to celebrate.

Saint Marty just hopes it doesn't take a plague of locusts to hear from his friends again.

Photo courtesy of my good friend and poet, Jane Piirto

March 18, 19, 20: Diabolical Spirit of Cruelty, Day of a Healthcare Worker, Miraculous

Merton learns how to deal with school bullies . . .

At first I used to go home nearly every Sunday taking the early train from Montauban-Villenouvelle, at about five-thirty in the morning.  And I would plead with Father to let me out of that miserable school, but it was in vain.  After about two months, I got used to it and ceased to be so unhappy.  The would was no longer so raw:  but I was never happy or at peace in the violent and unpleasant atmosphere of those brick cloisters.

The children I had associated with at St. Antonin had not been by any means angels, but there had at least been a certain simplicity and affability about them.  Of course, the boys who went to the Lycee were of the same breed and the same stamp:  there was no specific difference, except that they came from families that were better off.  All my friends at St. Antonin had been the children of workmen and peasants, with whom I sat in the elementary school.  But when a couple of hundred of these southern French boys were thrown together in the prison of that Lycee, a subtle change was operated in their spirit and mentality.  In fact, I noticed that when you were with them separately, outside the school, they were mild and peaceable and humane enough.  But when they were all together there seemed to be some diabolical spirit of cruelty and viciousness and obscenity and blasphemy and envy and hatred in mockery and fierce cruelty and in vociferous, uninhibited filthiness.  Contact with that wolf-pack felt very patently like contact with the mystical body of the devil:  and, especially in the first few days, the members of that body did not spare themselves in kicking me around without mercy.

The students were divided into two strictly segregated groups, and I was among "les petits," those in "quatrieme," the fourth class, and below it.  The oldest among us were fifteen and sixteen, and among these were five or six morose bullies with thick black hair growing out of their foreheads almost down to the eyebrows.  They were physically stronger than anybody else and, though less intelligent, they were craftier in the works of evil, louder in obscenity and completely unrestrained in their brutality, when the mood was on them.  Of course, they were not always unpleasant and hostile:  but in a sense their friendship was more dangerous than their enmity and, in fact, it was this that did the most harm:  because the good children who came to the school quickly got into the habit of tolerating all the unpleasantness of these individuals, in order not to get their heads knocked off for failing to applaud.  And so the the whole school, or at least our part of it, was dominated by their influence.

Merton learns how to deal with the bullies at the Lycee.  How to tolerate their unpleasantness.  Looks the other way, to save his own neck.  Let me tell you that the whole world right now is being bullied by a tiny virus.  People are terrified of this little thug, for good reason.  It's a life or death thing, like walking on a frozen lake in the spring.

I work in a medical office.  That medical office is attached to a hospital.  That hospital is going into virtual lockdown as the coronavirus spreads.  The exponential growth of it is sort of staggering, and, considering the situation in Italy, it has the potential to absolutely overwhelm the United States' healthcare system.

Now, you all know that.  I'm not saying anything that you haven't read before.  But let me give you a few glimpses into the day of a healthcare worker:

• All day, I register patients, answer phones, confirm appointments, and call insurance companies while wearing a mask (which actually isn't a whole lot of protections against this bully of a virus).
• Most of the patients with whom I speak on the phone are terrified of coming to their appointments.  I spend more time talking about the virus than anything to do with their current problem.
• I isolate myself in the office where I work.  Don't go to the cafeteria.  Don't go for walks.
• If I cough, people look at me strangely.  If I sneeze, people look at me strangely.  
• After filling out paperwork, patients hand me their clipboards and pens.  I sterilize them with bleach wipes immediately.
• At the end of my shift, I put on gloves and sanitize the entire office.  Computer keyboards.  Counters.  Pens.  Pencils.  Computer mouses.  Scanners.  Cords.  Chairs.  Today, I even bleached a sticky note I needed to keep.
• When I get home at night, I leave my shoes and coat on the front porch, march straight to the bathroom, strip, put all my clothes in the washer, and wash them in hot water.
• I still worry that I've carried something home to my family.

I am not an alarmist.  Everyone who knows me can tell you that.  I try not to sit at home reading poorly researched social media posts that are simply meant to panic people.  I've given up listening to or watching the news.  Yet, I am not immune to pandemic panic.  It's kind of hard not to be.

Tonight, around nine o'clock, an alarm went off on my daughter's cell phone.  We were all on the living room floor, playing a board game.  

"What's that for?" I asked.

"Oh," she said," that tells me when the International Space Station is passing directly over head."

We all sat staring at each other for a moment.  My wife.  Daughter.  Son.  Me.  Then, we got up off the floor and went outside.

There it was.

We stood staring up at a bright pinpoint of light moving across the dark bowl of night.  For a few minutes, none of us spoke.  Then, "It's kind of crazy to think there are people up there right now," said my daughter.

My son and wife nodded.

"Talk about social distancing," I said.

For the ten minutes or so we were outside, we forgot to be bullied by Covid-19.  Didn't worry about breathing in something that could kill us.  Instead, we just gave ourselves over to wonder.

Saint Marty was happy for a little miraculous in his life tonight.

March 13-14: The Whole Miserable Journey, Normal, Be the Solution

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.