April 9: Maunday Thursday, Timelessness, Poem from "Kyrie"

It is Holy Thursday, or Maunday Thursday.  In the Christian calendar, that means getting together to commemorate the Last Supper, before Christ is betrayed by Judas Iscariot and turned over to the Sanhedrin for judgement.

Because of the lack of church services right now, Holy Week has seemed lacking in the "holy" department.  Instead, the days just blend together.  I spent all day yesterday, thinking it was Thursday.  Usually, I feel the weight of these seven holy days pretty strongly.  The Christ narrative of the Passion sort of wrecks me every year.  Brings my spirit down and then resurrects it.  I'm craving that like Cheetos or a midnight milkshake right now. 

Without the markers of Palm Sunday and Maunday Thursday, I feel like I'm stuck in some kind of limbo, in between a New Year's Day and next Christmas.  Floating like a full moon trapped in black branches.

This is another result of the Covid-19 pandemic--timelessness.  Where everything and nothing is the same.  Tomorrow, I will participate in a Zoom Good Friday Service.  I'm playing piano and my wife is singing.  Something normal, in a way.  A marker on the map to Easter Sunday.

I will hold on to that tomorrow when my wife and I "go" to church.  It will feel as if I've taken one step forward toward some kind of future.  I know I am living in history right now.  Perhaps, in hundred years, a poet will write a collection of poems about this time.  Maybe the collection will be called Sanctus and start with an epigraph from John Prine:  "Jesus was a good guy, he didn't need this shit."

Saint Marty communioned with Hamburger Helper tonight.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

My father's cousin Rawley in the Service,
we got word, and I think a neighbor's infant,
that was common, my mother'd lost one too.

Then he went to town to join the war.
The Sheriff hauled him home in an open rig
spat on the street, been jailed a week or two.

She ran from the henhouse shrieking, shaking eggs
from the purse of her white apron to the ground.

Before I was born, he built a wide oak drainboard
in the kitchen, didn't just glue the boards,
screwed them down.  Glue held, one split in two.

My mother was an angel out of heaven.
My father was a viper.  I wished him dead,
then he was dead.  But she was too.

April 8: Panicking, Daily Gift, Poem from "Kyrie"

I have another poem for all my faithful disciples from Ellen Bryant's Voigt's poetry collection on the Spanish flu epidemic. 

You know, for those of my disciples who are able to stay at home, I'm happy for you.  Don't complain.  Enjoy the time.  Do something that gives you pleasure.  Connect with family and friends through whatever social media is available to you.  Tell people that you love them, even if you aren't the kind of person who says those three words often.  Listen to the birds outside your window.  And think about the people who are out there, making sure you're safe.  Those people struggle.  Daily.  Hourly.  Minutely.  Secondly.  Don't diminish that struggle.

I am not panicking about this pandemic.  I'm doing what I have to do to help my family survive intact.  Yes, I write about things that are bothering me.  Things that don't make sense.  I struggle on a daily basis with worry.  I admit it.  That doesn't mean that I don't think of my life, and the lives of the people I love, as a daily gift.

Saint Marty ain't Chicken Little, and the sky ain't falling.  It's just cloudy, with a chance of meatballs.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

In my sister's dream about the war
the animals had clearly human expressions
of grief and dread, maybe they were people
wearing animal bodies, cows at the fence,
hens in their nests.  The older dog implored her
at the door, out back, aeroplanes
crossing overhead, she found the young one
motionless on the grass, open-eyed,
left leg bitten off, the meat and muscles
stripped back neatly from the jagged bone.
For weeks I thought that was my fiance,
the mailbox was a shrine.  I bargained with
the little god inside--I didn't know
it was us she saw in the bloody trenches.

April 5, 6, 7: A Great Grace, Palm Sunday, Mistakes Are Being Made

DISCLAIMER:  I started this post on Sunday, and have been thinking and rethinking it every since.  It seems as though this pandemic has spread in me the inability to publish posts daily, or even every other day.  Like everyone else, I have many concerns with which I'm trying to deal.  I wake up worried, go through my day worried, go to bed worried.  Yet, I am simply a microcosm of an entire world.  So, my apologies, faithful disciples of Saint Marty.  I will try to do better . . .

Written on April 5:

Merton talks more about living with the pious Privats . . .

Those were weeks that I shall never forget, and the more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body.  I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and the delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity.  As a child, and since then too, I have always tended to resist any kind of a possessive affection on the part of any other human being--there has always been this profound instinct to keep clear, to keep free.  And only with truly supernatural people have I ever felt really at my ease, really at peace.

That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return.  It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest.  

I used to run in the woods, and climb the mountains.  I went up the Plomb du Cantal, which is nothing more than a huge hill, with a boy who was, I think, the Privat's nephew.  He went to a Catholic school taught, I suppose, by priests.  It had not occurred to me that every boy did not talk like the brats I knew at the Lycee.  Without thinking, I let out some sort of a remark of the kind you heard all day long at Montauban, and he was offended and asked where I had picked up that kind of talk.  And yet, while being ashamed of myself, I was impressed by the charitableness of his reaction.  He dismissed it at once, and seemed to have forgotten all about it, and left me with the impression that he excused me on the grounds that I was English and had used the expression without quite knowing what it means.  

After all, this going to Murat was a great grace.  Did I realize it?  I did not know what a grace was.  And though I was impressed with the goodness of the Privats, I could not fail to realize what was its root and its foundation.  And yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of being like them, of profiting in any way by their example.  

I think I only talked to them once about religion.  We were all sitting on the narrow balcony looking out over the valley, and the hills turning dark blue and purple in the September dusk.  Somehow, something came up about Catholics and Protestants and immediately I had the sense of all the solidity and rectitude of the Privats turned against me, accusing me like the face of an impregnable fortification.

The Privats pretty much live their faith every day of their lives.  That's why Merton seems drawn to them, why he both wants to be with them and like them.  Yet, at this point in his life, he doesn't connect their goodness with their religious faith.  He has no idea about grace.

It is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.  The most important seven days in the Christian calendar.  A time to focus on grace and blessings and forgiveness.  It was a strange Palm Sunday for me, without waving palms or singing "All Glory Laud and Honor" or sitting at a pipe organ.  It was a solemn day, full of the kind of silence I usually associate with Good Friday.  A sense of loss and disquiet pervading every minute.  And perhaps that's exactly the way Palm Sunday should be this year.

Because Palm Sunday is a reminder of all that is right and wrong in the universe.  Christ riding on a donkey into Jerusalem as people shout "Hosanna!"  And, on the opposite side of the coin, the Sanhedrin plotting against Christ and his followers.  That's the way of the world, I guess.  The haves always plotting against the have-nots.  The people in power always scheming to hold onto that power, even to the detriment of the ones they are supposed to serve.

The past 24 hours has proven to me that the power dynamic in place that first Palm Sunday is still very much alive today.  While I won't get into the details of my situation, I will say that sometimes leaders make terrible decisions, under the guise of public safety and interest, when those leaders are truly motivated by greed and power.  It's simply a reflection of what's happening on a national and international level.  People are going to get sick.  People are going to die.  All because our leaders can't or won't do the right thing.  That makes me really sad for my community and country.

Perhaps none of what I've just written makes a whole lot of sense.  I apologize for that.  If I told the truth, without telling it slant, as Emily Dickinson advises, I would get myself into a heap of trouble.  Let me just say that sometimes people I look up to disappoint me a great deal.  The Sanhedrin could have done the right thing, but they didn't   And Christ had to die on the cross in the Biblical narrative to atone for their offenses.

I'm just hoping that no one has to be crucified for the mistakes that are being made this Palm Sunday.  But, Palm Sunday always leads to Good Friday.  One person dies for the mistakes of others.  It's the story of Easter.  And it's the story of this time in human history.  Mistakes are being made, and somehow those mistakes will be corrected by the universe.  Every cross has its Easter resurrection and renewal.

That's story of Saint Marty's life at the moment.  Take up the cross.  Walk with hum for a while.  At least until Friday.

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