Plenty of Room for Light

I mowed this morning in silence - as much silence as can be with 30 horses of power throbbing in the tractor beneath you.  Eschewing my usual headphones with their podcasts or playlists, I just couldn’t stand any more sound.  The roar within was all I could manage.

This was the week it happened for me.  Some will likely wonder what took so long.  Others will be surprised that this week seemed any different from the ones preceding.  I can’t honestly account for it.  Something just…snapped.  

Yes, there are the increasingly heavy ramifications of the pandemic - the escalating infections, the mounting death toll, the prolonged isolation.  The flagrant refusal by many to acknowledge the risk.  But that’s all getting to be routine.  

This week was somehow different.  It all began with the surprising news of the unexpected, unexplained death of a brother-in-law - a kind and winsome soul three years my junior who laughed and listened and generously loved.  The thunderous silence of his absence is part of the noise.  Following that death, the week proceeded inexorably downhill.  There was the raucous protest in Kentucky on Sunday, in the space between the Capitol and the Governor’s mansion, during which the Governor was burned in effigy while the militants chanted the words of Lincoln’s assassin.  All this, with complicit elected officials looking on, presumably because the protesters do not agree with the Governor’s policies.  I say, “presumably,” because I do not have access to their minds - granting them the courtesy of that stressed presumption.  If they have a mind, any evidence of it was obliterated by their heinous actions the likes of which surely should be behind us.  Then there was the murder by suffocation of a black man in Minneapolis by an on-duty police officer while his fellow-officers looked away.  A knee on the throat of a handcuffed man, gasping for breath.  This, in the name of — what?  Justice?  Order?  And by such means as matter-of-factly deemed appropriate by who, outside of ISIS or the Taliban?  I had come to think of Minnesota as the last place such an egregious act might occur, but then I recall that whole “Governor Ventura” episode several years back, confirming that nowhere is apparently free of lapses.  

This killing, then, followed predictably by street protests of escalating violence, about which the President mused that the protesters should be shot - a reaction that made me gasp, but then considered the prospect that death by gunshot might be pleasanter than the cruel asphyxiation that had precipitated it all.  This, the same President who is berating social media outlets for fact-checking his falsehoods, and who has been busily firing government watchdogs - five as of this counting - allegedly because we no longer need them.  Proof, of course, that we do.  

But the week was just getting started.  News reports emerged today from Pennsylvania - the home of the "City of Brotherly Love" - that legislators of one political party who had tested positive for Covid-19 alerted members of their own caucus, but neglected to share the warning with those across the political aisle.  As if we had any doubt that politics is a blood sport.

Beyond all this, I’ll just gloss over the other political atrocities, corruptions, duplicities and chicaneries that by now are almost commonplace in this "land of the free and home of the brave."

All this, on the week headed by a collective commemoration and remembrance of those who died in service to their country - who fell in the line of duty.  

I can’t believe that this is what they fell for.

There is a scene in the classic movie, “Ghostbusters,” when a public official steps in and demands that power to the containment grid be shut off.  It is the grid that holds all the captured paranormals.  Protests ensue, court orders are produced, and eventually the switch is thrown; and all that had held back evil was removed.  In a riotous scene, the liberated specters burst through the roof of the converted fire station and catapult into the sky above and subsequently into and throughout the city.  All hell quite literally breaking loose.  

That’s what it feels like has happened.  The containment grid has been unplugged, the roof has been burst, and the demonic has been unleashed.  This, from a guy who doesn’t believe in demons.

There are those who will say I am getting “too political”; to whom I respond,” I haven’t even begun to be political.”  The actions I am decrying, the choices I am condemning have nothing to do with politics but with common decency, moral character, and the guiding principles of civilized society.  Neither “left” nor “right,” Republican or Democrat, these are the foundations I learned as a child from my parents, from my volunteer teachers in Sunday School, in public school, and the writings of our nation’s founders.  We have come to be so fixated on the Constitution - defending it, arguing over it, splitting the hairs of it, but a guiding creed that does not live in the hearts and lives of its citizens but only in its ink isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written, and has ceased to matter at all.  The wind has left the flag.

I pondered all this while mowing in silence, circling and circling, back and then forth; the lawn and the trails, the paths and even the culverts.  Mowing, motor throbbing, until I ran out of fuel.  

An apt metaphor, it seems to me. 

I’m ordinarily a fairly positive guy.  I can usually find a patch of blue in most stormy skies.  “Silver linings” and such.  

But I hit a low this week.  Something snapped.  And now here I am with a soul full of all this mess, and nothing left to mow.

I am left, as I often am, to lean on the wisdom of poets - 

—like Leonard Cohen who observed,

“There is a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.”

—like David Wilcox who notes that, like healed bones, we are…

“stronger than ever now in the broken places.”

I hope to God they are right.  We’ve got plenty of room for light to get in, and in the dubious event that we do actually find some healing amidst all this brokenness, endless locations for new strength.

A Few Quiet Pandemic Reflections

These are challenging times.  In ways that we are sick of talking about, our usual touchstones routinely, even silently, counted on to keep us oriented and grounded have been moved - or removed, altogether.  Yes, faith communities continue to call the faithful to worship, but on a screen, rather than in a room.  Restaurants send their culinary arts out the door in bags rather than into the dining room on trays.  Parks are closed.  Theaters are closed.  Coffee shops are closed.  We remain apart.  To the extent that we move among each other at all it is behind masks out of an abundance of caution and concern for one another.  

It’s changing, I know.  Restrictions are gradually being lifted.  Businesses are reopening.  Orders are expiring.  Beaches are crowding.  The pretense is filtering out that “life is getting back to normal.”  

And yet the "normalcy" is more aspirational than actual.  Fear persists.  Caution lingers.  Disorientation is the new orientation.  We’ve long since given up on knowing who to trust.  Trust, itself, has become politicized.  Those we counted on to have our collective best interests in the foreground have demonstrated a bias toward lesser, more calculated concerns.  At the very time we need each other, we feel increasingly alone.  

And from the highest office to which we have looked over the decades, in times of war and tragedy, terrorism and natural disaster, for leadership and bearing and a call to our best cultural self we get nothing but nonsensical, self-interested dissembling, perfidy and prevarication.  

It is maddeningly sad.  At the very time we need a cup of cool water we are routinely handed sand.  Or broken glass.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself keeping interesting intellectual company - brooding over the intersection of 3 pieces of spiritual wisdom that have intruded themselves upon my time of pandemic-imposed physical isolation.  One, from Pema Chödrön, Buddhist practitioner, teacher and writer, whose older but suddenly timely book is titled, “When Things Fall Apart”, and whose counsel is that everything does, indeed, fall apart - even that which crumbles the good, inevitably itself falls apart.

Another, from the 14th C. English mystic, Julian of Norwich, to whom was shown the assurance, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And finally, a nagging teaching of the Apostle Paul, from 1 Thessalonians 5.

“Be at peace among yourselves. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”

I sit with them all, open-handed; receiving; arguing.  

Drinking in.  

Chewing. 

The words are still settling into my soul.  I’m not sure what sense to make - or counsel to take - from the intersection of these three:  

An observation;

A confidence;

An instruction.  

But the conversation among them, across centuries and geographies and circumstances and devotions - a conversation into which they have now invited me - continues to be both provocative and, strangely, centering.

The facts, of course, remain.  The virus still encircles and infects us.  Our leaders still disappoint us.  Our lifestyles are still in disarray.  Things do, indeed, fall apart.  It is the nature of things.  Entropy and all that.

And yet all shall be well.  All manner of things shall be well.

In the meantime, we have work to do:  

Rejoicing

Praying

And in all circumstances - even these odd and disorienting ones - 

Give thanks.

It's a challenging assignment.  And I'm hardly at my best.  

But I’ll see what I can do.