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Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

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Entertainment in a time of coronavirus: We need it, though we may be a bit reluctant to speak of it when the death numbers keep rising and the photo above the fold of today’s Washington Post is of a stack of caskets in Italy.

Nevertheless, entertainment is helping many of us make it through. The Netflix servers (if they have servers) must be groaning from the load these days. And the same for Amazon Prime and Hulu and of course all the cable news stations, especially the news and movie ones.

I began to watch a show called “Pandemic,” a Netflix documentary. It was made last year but is so spot-on in its depiction of what’s happening now that it’s worth watching for that alone. But I decided last night to try something different, and watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a movie about Mr. Rogers and his relationship with a cynical journalist.

Turns out, there really was a cynical journalist. He really did write a long article about Mr. Rogers in Esquire magazine, and he and the journalist really did become friends.

Interested in how true-to-life the movie was, I read an article on its accuracy. It pointed out the differences, and also said that we don’t see enough of Mr. Rogers, that we don’t learn enough about his life. I saw the documentary about Mr. Rogers and found it boring, as I found Mr. Rogers (though my kids did not, and that’s what mattered).

But the movie’s story about Mr. Roger’s effect on others touched and inspired me. We see Mr. Rogers stooping to talk with a boy with cancer and assure him that he’s strong on the inside. We see Mr. Rogers swimming and Mr. Rogers praying for the people in his life, saying their names one by one. 

I took from it a simple truth: that there is always hope and that we must help each other. Not a bad message in a time of coronavirus.

(Photo: Screenshot of the Esquire cover from the 1998 article by Tom Junod. The film also contains a great scene of magazines being printed that I loved, being an ink-on-paper journalist at heart!) 

Trust Exercise

Trust Exercise

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It’s 24 degrees this morning as I take Copper for his early morning walk. He and I have a pre-dawn rendezvous. He wanders into the living room fully expecting me to be there, because, of course, I usually am.

It’s not important to him that I’m trying to get some writing done, or some online shopping, or that I’m checking out bathroom fixtures or insurance questions or any other of my oh-so-human preoccupations.

He wants the crisp air of winter in his nostrils, the crunch of frost-stiffened grass under his pads. He wants to trot a few houses down the block as if he owned the place, then trot those same few houses back to the sure promise of a yummy breakfast and a warm house.

His trust is pure and complete. I could learn something from it.

Appreciating Advent

Appreciating Advent

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It’s the first day of December and the first Sunday of Advent, and I’ve been trying to remember the last time we had such a tidy confluence. With Christmas on a Wednesday, that means each Advent Sunday will have its due, too.

I love Advent — the medieval-sounding hymns, the plain purple vestments, the wreaths and calendars, the air of joyful expectation.  Advent is about preparation, and I love that, too, because it reminds me that there are things worth waiting for and they are all the sweeter once they arrive.

Advent is often lost in the shuffle, folded into the Christmas season, but it has much to offer on its own. It reminds us to plan and anticipate, to watch and wonder, to read and reflect — and to do all of that secure in the knowledge that what we search for we will find, what we long for will be given to us.

Silence

Silence

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I just finished reading Jane Brox’s lovely new book Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives. Brox plumbs her topic by comparing the silence of solitary confinement with the silence of the cloister, an interesting approach that gives her a chance to examine the trials of silence as well as its gifts.

She draws often from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived much of his life in the cloistered Abbey of Gethsemani but whose writings gave him a worldwide audience. Here she quotes from Merton’s Asian Journal: “Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever-greater surrender to the creative action of grace and love in our hearts.”

Brox notes the creative power of silence, and its necessity. She concludes with this thought:

Silence can seem like a luxury. Or the fraught world has labeled it that way. But from what I know of it, I would argue that silence is as necessary as the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, which we so carefully guard and endlessly ponder, for it affirms the meaning of speech even as it provides a path to inner life, to beauty, observation and appreciation. It presents the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation, and with power.

The Contemplative Life

The Contemplative Life

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Shortly before leaving the house on Saturday, I panicked about what books to bring.  I jettisoned the hefty library book, a novel scheduled for September book group. There will be plenty of time for it, and it hadn’t grabbed me yet.

I thought about packing a book I’d already read, a security blanket of sorts. But that seemed too unadventurous.

I ended up with Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl. It is part travelogue, part memoir and part spiritual exploration.

The contemplative life is what Hampl is after, but to get to it she takes a walking tour to Assisi, home of St. Francis.  The walking feeds the contemplation, and provides authentic moments like the one when a woman in a kerchief runs out to offer the pilgrims two bottles of her homemade wine, a gesture “a million years old, far beyond courtesy, rooted in ancient communion.”

“Walking allowed such timeless moments, making us slow-moving parts of the landscape we passed through. Maybe the world isn’t, at its daily heart, as modern as we tend to think. As we walked, it kept reverting to an ancient, abiding self.”

And it is in that “ancient, abiding self” that Hampl discovers — and perhaps all of us could find — the lives we are looking for.

What Are We Doing Here?

What Are We Doing Here?

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I’m picking my way through Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays, What Are We Doing Here? I love Robinson’s fiction and am enlightened by her nonfiction. But I have to read the latter carefully, and more than once, so dense is the prose, so tightly packed are the ideas it holds.

The extra time is never wasted, as her ideas are countercultural in the best sense of that word. Robinson writes about humanism and religion — and she writes unapologetically. Most of our great institutions grew out of our theology, which she defines as “the great architecture of thought and wonder that makes religious experience a house of many mansions, open to the soul’s explorations.”

Robinson does not shy away from delivering charges. Here’s an example: “One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind.”

To read Robinson is to be reminded of a world richer and fuller than the one we inhabit now, one where what she calls the “moral self, that old wanderer through the trials and temptations of earthly life,” was freer to roam and risk and challenge and live.

Come with Thy Grace

Come with Thy Grace

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I often go to a Saturday-evening church service that “counts” for Sunday (it’s a Catholic thing), and was surprised when I arrived to see the red wall hangings and vestments. I had forgotten that it was Pentecost, or more technically, it was Pentecost Eve. Turns out, I had unwittingly worn orange, and so was semi-appropriately decked out for the feast day.

I’ve written about Pentecost before, noting that it was a celebration of clarity, that from the many voices came one.  What spoke to me this time, though, was the jubilation of it all: the extra prayers (a sequence before the gospel), the special blessing, and, of course, the music.

It dawned on me, then, and not for the first time, that one of the needs church meets for me is singing aloud. I’m not saying I don’t go for spiritual strengthening and inspiration. But to join voices with hundreds of others is not an opportunity I’m given every day.

We opened with “Come, Holy Ghost.” Thanks to my parochial schooling, I know the words so well that I didn’t even crack the hymnal till the second verse. “Come with thy grace and heavenly aid, to fill the hearts which thou hast made. To fill the hearts which thou hast made.” I could almost hear my seventh- and eight-grade classmates belting it out with me, struggling as usual to reach that high “D.”

Transcendence

Transcendence

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A friend sent me an electronic Easter card, the kind that comes with music and motion, with sweet scenes of birds and bunnies.

Only this one played the powerful “God So Loved the World” by John Stainer.

I’ve heard this piece before and marveled at it, but something about the animation of the dove — a pure white bird flying heavenward, spreading flowers in its wake — and the dynamics of this hymn, the great swells of its sound, the ache in its harmonies — spoke powerfully of the mystery and the promise of this day.

I write these words in the office, a room I don’t often sit in this time of day. I don’t know why not — because it sits in the front of the house, the one the light touches first.

It is not just Resurrection we celebrate on this day, but transcendence.

Cathedral Time

Cathedral Time

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I’m not used to reading good news in the newspaper, especially not these days, so I was surprised last night when I finally settled down with the paper to learn that the walls of Notre Dame are still standing and the exquisite rose window is still intact.

Yes, the roof and the spire are gone, and some priceless treasures are lost, but many others were saved. Already stories of heroism are emerging: the chaplain who braved the blaze, the human chain that rescued precious artwork. Donations and pledges are pouring in. Notre Dame will be rebuilt, though it will doubtless be on “cathedral time,” not at the pace we might expect in the 21st century.

Even more encouraging were the perspectives the articles contained: that cathedrals are patchwork creations. The fallen spire we lament was a relatively late addition to Notre Dame. Europe is filled with cathedrals that have risen from fires and firebombing: St. Paul’s in London, the cathedral in Dresden. Besides, in many ways the places are as sacred as the buildings, and they remain sacred even when the stones are singed and the rafters give way.

The most optimistic accounts mentioned the survival of the gold cross on the altar and the votive lights that remained lit throughout the ordeal — also the fact that the fire happened during Holy Week, the most sacred time in the Catholic church’s liturgical year, a time when we celebrate redemption and resurrection.

I’ll end with this from the Washington Post’s architecture critic Philip Kennicott:

Meanwhile, the roof will rise again, and in a century some bored teenagers will stand in the plaza before the great Gothic doors and listen as their teacher recounts the great fire of 2019, just one chapter among all the others, and seemingly inconsequential given the beauty of the building as it stands glowing in a rare burst of sunlight on a spring day in Paris.

Lenten Thoughts

Lenten Thoughts

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Two nights ago after a leisurely dinner, I found myself reading a fine essay about Lent. I rounded off the dinner with a few squares of white chocolate as I pondered Michael Gerson’s words.

The chocolate is significant because I didn’t give it up this year, and in Gerson’s thoughts I found some justification for my decision. “Some of us give up sweets,” he writes, “with the dual purpose of self-sacrifice and dieting. It is fully consistent with American ideals to kill two birds with one ancient spiritual practice — examining our inner selves while losing those 10 pesky pounds.” The focus instead ought to be on the inner life, he says.

What I was striving for this Lent was to pray more, snipe less — to be more grateful for that which has been given to me. In that I’ve been only partially successful. But I’m encouraged when I learn of others who struggle too.

Gerson describes an earlier “enforced Lent” he experienced recently, a week in the hospital with poor food and no electronics. “What did I miss? Lots of things. What could I do without? Pretty much everything.”

Such denial, he writes, reveals that the “richness of life is found elsewhere — in … the experience of gratitude — not for this thing or that thing — but for God’s radiating presence in all things.”

I don’t typically seek spiritual uplift from the newspaper. But that’s what I found the other day.