I find that I am no longer keeping up appearances.
Usually I would never let anyone else see my bed unmade (unless perchance that person were sharing my bed). If I were to use The Great Orange Ball in a photograph, I would carefully arrange it so that the UPC code was hidden.
But, as my nephew said this morning on Facebook,
'These are troubling times.
It is hard to remain calm and appear strong.'
And so I slipped this morning and made coffee without making up my bed, as simple an act as that would have been. 'Social distancing' requires hardly any change in my daily behavior, since I already lived mostly as a hermit. The occasional lunch or beer at the beach with a friend, my Saturdays' volunteering at the food bank, the ceremonial trip to the library, chatter with the people who make me coffee, chance encounters with neighbors, these were the content of most ofmy face-to-face social activities. An introvert, I don't even have a cat.
And yet.
', , ,none of us liveth to himself,
and no man dieth to himself.'
Now, it is true that I hope for an introverted death, to be able to enjoy my last breath without anyone else making any sort of fuss around me. But that in no way means that I am unaware of or immune to others' needs and joys and sufferings. I know the nature of life.
'In the morning it is green, and groweth up,
but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.'
But that our common fate seems often to catch us by surprise and make us sad.
So, I stay awake long into the morning, watching videos of people caught up in the net of becoming and passing away, or reading Albert Camus, or Oscar Wilde, or the Psalter, wishing that there were some magic incantation I could spread like an internet virus to bring joy in the morning. Then in the morning I lie in bed towards noontime, hoping to hear the cries of joy.
When I was a priest, and buried people regularly, I always began the office with this anthem, which I was tempted to post on Facebook as a response to my nephew:
'In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?
'Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.
'Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.'
I am no longer a priest, so I no longer am one who regularly says 'comfortable words' to people gathered to be made whole again by the power of words. And yet I find that I turn to words for my own comfort, for my own wholeness. One of my most powerful memories of the power of words is from a time I said the last rites and then the burial service for a young man who died from brain cancer. His mother could not read without glasses, she had no prayer book, and she had become in her old age an 'evangelical christian'. And yet I saw her murmering the words of the Burial Office with me, a memory from her earlier life.
Few images are more powerful than those of the Burial Office, which not only uses the piled up names of God from the anthem I just quoted, but also the idea of God as a knitter:
'Almighty God, who has knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant, we beseech thee, to thy whole Church in paradise and on earth, thy light and thy peace.
'Grant that all who have been baptized into Christ's death and resurrection may die to sin and rise to newness of life, and that through the grave and gate of death we may pass with him to our joyful resurrection.'
The first person I knew who died was my grandfather, who was given a Southern Baptist funeral, with lots and lots of lillies and a quartet of male friends singing 'In the Garden'. Then, before the lid was closed on his coffin, his sister my aunt lifted me up to look at him one last time and told me that I would see him again in heaven. She used the short version of the Book of Common Prayer.
Now I have problems with the exceptionalism of Christianity. It just don't scale. My mother retained a trust in the magic power of words, especially when they were joined with elemental magic. She told me happily when my younger brother was baptized: now he was safe from the fires of hell, aut least in her mind. Undoubtedly Hindu mothers tell their children similar happy tales of rites performed to ensure the eternal safety of other family members.
But the power of beautiful words remains, often stronger it seems than the vision of horrors. I suspect this is because it is language that really knits us into one family. It is language which separates us from other animals. Yes, birds and whales sing, but they don't produce sonnets and prayer books. We look at language as something we have in common with the gods. Often we don't even consider those barbarians who don't speak our own little language to be people at all.
I find it telling that when the German National Socialists were beginning to institute what many would consider the most barbaric reign in human history, they denied the power of language and fell back onto genetics: the power of Baptism was denied and people with Jewish ancestry, even though baptized, even though grandchildren of people who had been baptized, were shipped off to be enslaved and killed.
Most modern, civilized, folk, however, recognize that language is a 'sure and certain hope' at least, that all of us babblers are in this together. I am not alone as I stay awake until the wee hours of the morning. There is 'a great cloud of witnesses'--about 7.6 billion witnesses--surrounding me. In the morning I find that they, too, have kept vigil.
It is my hope that we shall awake on the morning when the current plague has passed to recognize that we are all in this together. The temptation is to divide ourselves into god and demons.
My nephew reminded us on Facebook that in these troubled times more than ever we need to remember that we are all troubled, but that the key to our survive is to be kind to the woman at the grocery store who gets the last carton of eggs. I am not one of those folk who thinks that people are basically good. I've seen the photographs of bombed cities and burned churches. Nor, however, am I I convinced that people are basically bad. I've seen the photographs of Russian peasant women sharing bread with starving German soldiers. I am one of those folks who think people have great potential, and that people are always faced with choices, and it is never true that there is no other choice. So, I will end this little essay with a few other lines from the Burial Office:
'So teach us to number our days,
that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.'
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