May 24: Barbecue, Normal, Poem from "Kyrie"

This afternoon, I had a socially distanced Memorial Day weekend barbecue at my parents' house.  My wife, kids, and I sat on the back porch, six feet away from my sisters and mother, and ate hot dogs and bratwurst and watermelon. 

We hadn't been together like that since mid-March.  Yes, we were careful, even though my sister, Rose, who has Down syndrome, really didn't comprehend the six-foot distance rule and tried several times to approach and hug us.  It wasn't "normal" by any means.  But it was as close as we could get to the Sunday dinners we used to have pre-pandemic.

I've heard people bridling against the term "new normal" recently.  Sometimes that bridling borders on anger.  I understand the emotions behind this reaction.  It's a symptom of mourning.  People are grieving all that has been lost because of Covid-19:  making a quick trip to the grocery store to satisfy your craving for Cheetos; stopping to check on your elderly parents on your way home from work; sitting in a church pew beside your neighbors on a Sunday morning and catching up; going for a walk and not having to wear a face mask; attending community parades and events.  All these things have become part of history for now.  The world has shifted, and not gradually.  The change was seismic.  A rift in the fabric of society that appeared almost overnight.  And it has left all of humankind reeling from the loss.

Yet I don't think it's healthy to maintain a death-hold on the "normal" we used to know.  Doing that will simply prolong the pandemic.  By refusing to put on that face mask, insisting on gathering in bars or restaurants or churches, people are not re-establishing normal.  They are just refusing to deal with their grief (and also spreading the virus more, pushing us toward another complete shutdown).  It's like setting a place at the dinner table for a person who has died.  It may feel comforting to cling to the habit, but the deceased person's chair will still remain empty.

So let's not think of "old" normal or "new" normal.  Let's not think of normal at all.  If you know my family, normal is not a word that comes to mind anyway.  Instead, let's think about how to respect each other, support each other, love each other.  That's what will get us all through this.

Tonight, I celebrate time spent with family.  Safely.  Filled with laughter and teasing.  The miracle of togetherness.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

What were they thinking--everyone we knew,
in school, in church, took me aside
to praise--to me--my sister, as if
I were another of her parents,
or else they were, that proud and fond:
aren't you lucky, isn't she gifted,
doesn't she look grand in her new blue suit?
I had a new suit cut from the same bolt,
quick mind, good heart--vivid blossoms
in other light--yes yes, she did, she was,
what were they thinking?  Terrible,
to be the one who should have died.

May 20: Gentlemanliness, Hippie/Socialist Rebel, Normal

Young Thomas Merton settles into his new school . . .

Oakham, Oakham!  The grey murk of the winter evenings in that garret where seven or eight of us moiled around in the gaslight, among the tuck-boxes, noisy, greedy, foul-mouthed, fighting and shouting!  There was one who had a ukulele which he did not know how to play.  And Pop used to send me the brown rotogravure sections of the New York Sunday papers, and we would cut out the pictures of the actresses and paste them up on the walls.

And I toiled with Greek verbs.  And we drank raisin wine and ate potato chips until we fell silent and sat apart, stupefied and nauseated.  And under the gaslight I would write letters to Father in the hospital, letters on cream-colored notepaper, stamped with the school crest in blue.

After three months it was better.  I was moved up into the Upper Fifth, and changed to a new study downstairs, with more light, though just as crowded and just as much of a mess.  And we had Cicero and European history--all about the nineteenth century, with a certain amount of cold scorn poured on Pio Nono.  In the English class we read The Tempest and the Nun's Priest's Tale and the Pardoner's Tale and Buggy Jerwood , the school chaplain, tried to teach us trigonometry.  With me, he failed.  Sometimes he would try to teach us something about religion.  But in this he also failed.

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene.  Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

There was no rowing at Oakham, since there was no water.  But the chaplain had been a rowing "blue" at Cambridge, in his time.  He was a tall, powerful, handsome man, with hair greying at the temples, and a big English chin, and a broad, uncreased brow, with sentences like "I stand for fair-play and good sportsmanship" written all over it.

His greatest sermon was on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians--and a wonderful chapter indeed.  But his exegesis was a bit strange.  However, it was typical of him and, in a way, of his whole church.  "Buggy's" interpretation of the word "charity" in this passage (and in the whole Bible) was that it simply stood for "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.'"  In other words, charity meant good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder.

There he stood, in the plain pulpit, and raised his chin above the heads of all the rows of boys in black coats, and said:  "One might go through this chapter of St. Paul and simply substitute the word 'gentleman' for 'charity' wherever it occurs.  'If I talk with the tongues of men and of angels, and be not a gentleman, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal . . . A gentleman is patient, is kind, a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up . . . A gentleman never falleth away.' . . ."

And so it went.  I will not accuse him of finishing the chapter with "Now there remain faith, hope, and gentlemanliness, and the greatest of these is gentlemanliness . . ." although it was the logical term of his reasoning.  

The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts.  But I think St. Peter and the twelve apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.

Merton is pretty good at skewering the pretentious stuffed shirts of English (and French) society.  But he is able to do it without being mean.  He simply reports the facts and then follows them to their natural, absurd conclusions.  So, the passage from First Corinthians becomes an endorsement of English gentlemanliness instead of an exhortation to love and charity.

Of course, this also proves something else:  people have been using the Bible and Christian teachings for their own agendas since Christ was put in the tomb.  These days in the United States, you don't have to look too far to find people doing terrible things and justifying their actions by labeling them "Christian."  Frankly, I'm surprised that some "religious" group hasn't used the current pandemic as an excuse to say that the Lord hath loosed this plague upon us in punishment for allowing illegal immigrants to live within our borders or for sanctioning gay marriage.  Don't laugh.  It may happen.

Being a life-long Christian, I get a little tired of this kind of perversion of the teachings of Christ.  The Jesus I learned about in catechism told everyone to feed the hungry, take care of the poor and sick, shelter the homeless.  He was kind of a sandal-wearing, itinerant hippie/socialist rebel.  Peace and love.  Not war and hate.  Share what you have.  Distribute your wealth.  Because you can't buy your way into heaven.  If you've gone to Sunday school for any length of time, all of this should sound pretty familiar.

So, we have a world right now in crisis, brought to its knees by a microscopic organism.  Millions of people out of work.  Hundreds of thousands of people sick and dying.  Yet, the thing foremost on people's minds at the moment is being forced to wear masks in public, and, in conjunction with that, not being able to go to T. J. Maxx or Cracker Barrel.  I went to a Zoom meeting a few nights ago where someone said, "I just want things to go back to normal."

I want to consider that comment for a moment.  The normal that we had before this pandemic hit was a world on the brink of climate disaster.  Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing oppressive governments because of (among other things) genocide.  In the United States, we had young people living under crushing student debt, and a healthcare system more concerned with profit than healing.  Rampant racism and homophobia and misogyny and Islamophobia.  All normal pre-pandemic.

I think we have an opportunity here to reconsider normal.  Maybe establish something closer to what the sandal-wearing hippie had in mind.  A normal based on love and charity instead of greed and power.  Where people realize that wearing a mask isn't an infringement on their rights, but an act of caring and respect.  Perhaps it will be a normal where wealth isn't accumulated and hoarded but distributed to the unemployed and under-employed.  Think of that--everyone watching out for each other, loving each other.  If you've gone to Sunday school for any length of time, that should sound pretty familiar.

I went for a long walk today with my son and puppy.  We hiked what's called the Iron Ore Heritage Trail, which is a 47-mile trail that stretches across the Marquette Iron Range in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  We only hiked about four miles of it, from our hometown to the neighboring town.  It was a 70-degree day, and there was birdsong and insect song and wind song.  And we ran into other hikers, as well as bikers and picnickers.  Every person had a smile and kind word.  We all kept our six-foot distances out of respect and love, and the world felt right.  Kind.  Good.

This is a normal I wouldn't mind maintaining.  A miraculous, new one.  One that hippie from Nazareth would be proud of.

For that Saint Marty gives thanks today.

March 30-31: Most Remarkable People, Doublespeak, Nostalgia

Merton writes about the Christmas of 1926 with some remarkable people . . .

In the winter of 1926 Father went to Murat.  Murat is in the Cantal, the old Province of Auvergne, a Catholic province.  It is in the mountains of central France, green mountains, old volcanoes.  The valleys are full of rich pastures and the mountains are heavy with fir trees or raise their green domes into the sky, bare of woods, covered with grass.  The people of this land are Celts, mostly.  The Auvergnats have been more or less laughed at, in French tradition, for their simplicity and rusticity.  They are very stolid people, but very good people.

At Murat, Father boarded with a family who had a little house, a sort of a small farm on the slope of one of the steep hills outside the town, and I went up there to spend the Christmas holidays, that year.

Murat was a wonderful place.  It was deep in snow, and the houses with their snow-covered roofs relieved the grey and blue and slate-dark patter of the buildings crowded together on the sides of these hills.  The town huddled at the foot of a rock crowned by a colossal statue of the Immaculate Conception, which seemed to me, at the time, to be too big, and to bespeak too much religious enthusiasm.  By now I realize that it did not indicate any religious excess at all.  These people wanted to say in a very obvious way that they loved Our Lady, who should indeed be loved and revered, as a Queen of great power and a Lady of immense goodness and mercy, mighty in her intercession for us before the throne of God, tremendous in the glory of her sanctity and her fullness of grace as Mother of God.  For she loves the children of God, who are born into the world with the image of God in their souls, and her powerful love is forgotten, and it is not understood, in the blindness and foolishness of the world.

However, I did not bring up the subject of Murat in in order to talk about the statue, but about M. and Mme. Privat.  They were the people with whom we boarded, and long before we got to Murat, when the train was climbing up the snowy valley, from Aurillac, on the other side of the Puy du Cantal, Father was telling me.  "Wait until you see the Privats."

In a way, they were to be among the most remarkable people I ever knew.  

Any person who knows me knows that Christmas is my jam.  Therefore, I love Merton's description of Murat in deep snow during the yuletide season.  And the huge statue of the Virgin Mary towering over the entire town.  It speaks to my Catholic childhood, where the walls were adorned with pictures of the Sacred Heart and a statue of the Blessed Mother looked down on family dinners from her perch on top of the china cabinet.

In this time of pandemic, I find my mind retreating to these simpler times, when life wasn't a daily struggle.  Even before Covid-19 entered the global consciousness, my life had become difficult in many ways.  Now, facing a kind of plague of Biblical proportions, I feel like everything that I thought was important and consequential is being stripped away.  Each day brings one less thing, one less comfort.

This morning, when I got to the hospital to report to work, I had to stand in line.  At the front of the line, I had to answer a series of questions ("Have you been experiencing fever or respiratory symptoms in the past week?" and "Have you traveled outside the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?" and "Have you been in contact with anyone who has been outside of the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?")  And then entered another line to have my temperature taken.  Only after passing this screening was I able to get my badge scanned and enter the building.

It was surreal, as if I was living in some kind of police state.  Now, I know that all this is being done in the interest of public safety, but that knowledge doesn't make this newest change any easier.  And a new (or old) language has entered the public domain, one that Orwell identified in 1948:  doublespeak.  Messages layered in double-negatives.  Announcements made and then minutes later retracted, rescinded, revised, or revoked.  This is the new normal.

That is why I allow myself to indulge in nostalgia these days.  Yes, the old days were not all sunshine and rainbows.  There was still poverty and racial injustice and homophobia and xenophobia and war and pestilences.  There hasn't been a time since Adam and Eve walked out of the Garden (metaphorically or literally, depending on your belief system) that human history hasn't been rife with these plagues, physical and existential. 

For tonight, however, I hold onto memories, like Christmases of the past.  My daughter's first Christmas.  She was twenty days old.  Fit into my elbow and slept there like a beautiful gift.  I hold moments like that close to me right now.  Dip into it like fresh water from a cold well.

Saint Marty wishes you all beauty and rest.