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Fighting Fear

Fighting Fear

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I try to think of something else but it’s hard not to. I have a daughter flying into Dulles from West Africa this weekend.  She’s not arriving from one of the affected countries but from somewhere close. And while at this point the extra scrutiny (temperatures taken, isolation if necessary) only applies to passengers arriving from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, I wonder if officials will widen the net, start checking those arriving from any West African nation.

It’s fear at work, I know. But fear is contagious, too. And just as there’s no vaccine for Ebola so also there is no immunization for fear. Information doesn’t help — it’s hard to read a newspaper or watch the news — but ignorance is no better.

One of the most poignant news programs I’ve heard about the epidemic described what doctors and nurses do in Liberia before starting their shifts. Here they are on the front lines, dealing with Ebola patients every day, wearing substandard protective gear and working in primitive conditions. And what do they do before anything else? They stand in a circle, they pray and they sing. 

If they can sing, so can we. Sing in their honor. Sing for their safety. Sing until the fear goes away.

Resurrection, Continued

Resurrection, Continued

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As it happens, the priest based his Easter sermon on the article mentioned below. There was no equivocation from the pulpit — not that I expected any. But there was this comment: that we need no proof, no scientific evidence, to believe. All we need is faith.

Having my father on the other side now — someone who lived so fully on earth in his human “skin” — makes me think and hope that all that love, all that energy, has gone somewhere. That it exists in a form I can’t access at this point makes sense to me.

Last Friday I stopped by the church for a few moments. I had driven home from Kentucky that day and missed the service I usually attend. By instinct I headed for the small chapel, what used to be the main sanctuary before the grand, new one was built.

The minute I stepped into that welcome darkness I was struck by the aroma. It was the Easter flowers. They had already been delivered — all the lilies, azaleas, hydrangeas and hyacinths — and were being stored in the chapel until the great Easter vigil celebration Saturday evening. The fragrance was almost overpowering, but I inhaled deeply anyway.

It was a preview, a welcome aromatic reminder, of all that lies in store.

Resurrection

Resurrection

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Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. It is also April 20, exactly a month after my father passed away. I’ve  been thinking of this coincidence —3/20 and 4/20 — and of the leap of faith required to believe in bodily resurrection after witnessing first-hand a bodily demise. 

It is, I suppose, an appropriate time to be pondering this eternal mystery. And an article in today’s Washington Post convinces me that I’m not alone.

As Easter approaches, many Christians struggle with how to understand
the Resurrection. How literally must one take the Gospel story of Jesus’
triumph to be called a Christian? Can one understand the Resurrection
as a metaphor[?] …

Here’s what I’ve decided. And it solves no great theological mystery. It’s only what I have to get me through:

It is no metaphor to me that Dad is gone — nor is it metaphor that he lives on. There is real, tangible proof that he does.  He is there in the World War II books and the multiple DVDs of “Twelve O’Clock High” (his favorite film and one he believed everyone should watch. “It’s not about war,” he told his friends. “It’s about leadership.”).  He is there in the bell he installed on the back door so the cat could be let in. He is there in the statue of St. Francis, one of many items he planted in the now overgrown garden. Most of all he is present in all of his friends, in my mom and in each one of us, his children.

You may have to look harder for him now — you couldn’t miss Dad before; he was always the life of the party — but he’s there, I’m sure of it.

After the Deluge

After the Deluge

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The pipe burst on Friday, the day after I sent the magazine to the printer. I was working at home, but colleagues noticed water seeping under my door and puddling on the carpet. They called facilities, which sent personnel, shop vacs, large fans, drying machines. My desk and file cabinet were put on blocks.

The hard work paid off.  Other than a few water-damaged boxes (which I’ve tossed) the place looks better than it did last week.

The waters came, raged and departed.

They left behind a stiller, calmer world.



(This may not look still and calm, but compared with last week…)

Season of Growth

Season of Growth

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Lent is late this year. Like spring, it is taking its time. But today is Ash Wednesday, so the 40 days have begun, the ecclesiastical season that prepares us for Easter with prayer, fasting and contemplation.

Somewhere along the way — it’s been a few years ago now — I learned that “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “lencten,” meaning spring. The days are lengthening. It’s harder to appreciate this when Ash Wednesday falls on February 13, as it did last year.

But this year it arrives on March 5. It’s light outside as I type these words. And I decide to approach the season with less dread and more optimism. A bit more like Advent. As a moving toward rather than a dredging down. As a season of growth rather than self-denial.

Radiant Way

Radiant Way

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For me it’s a return to work after two weeks off — a good day to celebrate the Epiphany, a feast that marks revelation, the manifestation of the divine and, in the words of James Joyce (courtesy of the Writer’s Almanac), the “sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment when ‘the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.'”

The workaday world sorely needs some radiance, some shining representation of its meaning and purpose.

So today, on my return, I will look for it.

On Faith and Coincidence

On Faith and Coincidence

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I just realized (in my typically math-challenged way) that yesterday, the first day of 2014, was also my 1, 200th post. A pleasing synchronicity between calendar and art — even more enjoyable because I was unaware of it until today.

I like to think that there is order in the universe, that such coincidences don’t happen randomly. What purpose could there be in this one? Only this: that any coincidence heightens my belief that there is meaning in creation.

Which leads me to ponder passages from Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Freedom of Thought.”

For almost as long as there has been science in the West, there has been
a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the
physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists
among us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,”
associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the
category of the spiritual.  … 

If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the
endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of
modern life for which we should all be grateful.

 Being grateful for the “endless brilliance of creation” — and believing that it is a creation — these are thoughts I take with me into the new year. That they were triggered by a “random” coincidence, so much the better.

The Rest of Us

The Rest of Us

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Yesterday was All Saints Day; today is All Souls Day.

This is the day for good intentions and ragged realities: prayers not said and penances not completed. Gratitude glossed over in the crush of living.

This is the day for apologies and starting over and resolving to do better next time.

This is not a day for the practically perfect in every way.

This is a day for the rest of us.

Composites

Composites

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There were two of them, composite photographs of my fourth and sixth grade classes. At first the faces were familiar but nameless. But the longer I looked, the more the names returned: Teresa, Diane, Melissa, Amelia, Jody, Joan, Carol, Julia, Peggy, Debbie. And from the earlier one, Dickie, Jay and Charles. (We were the one outlier class still “mixed” at that age. The nuns preferred same-sex education after third grade.)

Fourth grade. Nine years old. Before I worried about my hair. Before I cared about boys. We played four square (the ball game not the social media app) across the divided playground — two boys on one side, two girls on the other. (Yes, the playground was “same sex,” as well, divided down the middle.)

What do I remember most about that year? That we had a lay teacher, Mrs. Hollis, a bit of an outlier herself. And that at the end of day, when she had crammed us with all the religion, math, science, reading, writing and social studies we could hold, she played recordings of Broadway musicals on the stereo.

I’ve loved them ever since.

(This is the “welcome” mat for Christ the King School.)

A Mighty Wind

A Mighty Wind

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Sitting in church yesterday, thinking about Pentecost, not just the upper room and the “rushing mighty wind,” but the many tongues and how the apostles heard each language as if it were their own, I decided, in a distinctly non-theological way, that this is a feast of clarity.

To hear the many but harken only to the one. To walk in confusion but know the way. Of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit I suppose it is the second, understanding.

But there is an aural quality to it. That from a cacophony of noise came one still voice. From a meaningless melange of sounds came one true melody.

It was the gift of discernment. The mighty wind blew everything else away. What remained was what is essential. That’s what they received.