bearing blog

Custodial work.

How long before it feels normal to wander around a store looking at things, picking them up and putting them down? I went to the office supply store over the weekend, just to remind myself that I could; I bought a box of pens, a binder, a stack of legal pads, things I would need eventually if not yet.  I met a friend for coffee.    

My city still has a mask mandate, and I am glad; the state pulled them prematurely, I think.  Why waste the opportunity to link it to a metric, like percentage of adults vaccinated, or case rate?  Why not spend a little political capital to protect folks who haven't yet been able to get vaccinated, or the permanently immunocompromised?   Why not at least stress a responsibility for the not-yet-vaccinated to keep masking a little longer?

Well.  If we are all about personal choice now... it's an option to avoid errands in the suburbs, I suppose.  I hope that is enough for the vulnerable. 

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I am not vulnerable; I'm now multiple weeks post-second-jab.  And yet I'm still getting used to being indoors around the unmasked.  And yes, you do still see them, even in buildings where the proprietor requires them.  Of these, I am disappointed to report, the place where I saw the most flouting of the stated rules?  Church.  On the two separate days I attended after my return, masks were ostensibly still required; the archbishop issued appeals reminding people to cover their faces for just a little longer; and yet on my first day back I was surrounded in my assigned pew-seat by people who  pulled their masks right off their faces when they sat down.

Gross. 

I feel physical revulsion, partly because of the clouds of aerosols that I am now hyper-aware that everyone is exhaling all the time, but also a spiritual revulsion:   because of the more acute knowledge I now have about the general regard for the sick and poor (or even for simple obedience and charity).  It's going to take me a while to get over that, probably longer than it will take for me to stop thinking about clouds of aerosols.

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The bright side is that if I had any compunction whatsoever about staying away all this time and never attending Mass indoors, I don't have it now.  It wasn't a safe place, and many of the people there were not safe people.  

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But I am safer now, and I know it.   "I am trying to be brave and forgiving," wrote a vaccinated commenter on this post by Jamie, and what else is there to do but to try to do the same?  What else positive, I mean?   

 If I'm vaccinated, and if I've already made up my mind not to bring my unvaccinated children to Mass yet—and I have indeed made up my mind about that, see above re: unsafe people—the state of other people's faces is no longer actionable information.  I am not tasked with the responsibility of reportage or sampling; deciding is over, so I don't need to continue studying my surroundings; no one has asked me, "Erin, next time you go to Mass, will you look around and tell me if it looks safe?"  And anyway, "looks safe" is meaningless now.  

So... it's time for the practice of custody of the eyes.

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Custody of the eyes:  Take upon yourself the responsibility of not being bothered by the sight of someone else, by focusing elsewhere. 

"Don't stare," we tell little children who are just learning that people can appear to us many different ways, sometimes startling ones.   This idea is not just for children.

It's good for us, if we are tempted to indignance or annoyance or anger when we see someone breaking some kind of rule or norm, to mind our own business.  I'm not saying that everyone should always mind their own business.  Some people are explicitly tasked with enforcement of important rules, and occasionally charity or justice demand the intervention of bystanders.  But if it's not my job to intervene... ...and there isn't any immediate harm to another person whom I could realistically protect... and if I can sense that the effect it's having on me is mainly indignance and rash judgment... yeah.  It's better to keep your eyes on your own work, and remember all your own flaws and how you would like to be judged by them were they known.

It's often better for the other as well.  If you're suddenly aware that you stand out for some reason, and you don't need help (or help won't help) isn't it a relief when people pretend not to notice?  If you are an inexperience mother trying to get the snuffling baby latched, or the parent of a suddenly weeping toddler, or an adolescent or adult who bursts into tears in public:  averted eyes are often a blessing.  There is nothing at all offensive about a hungry baby or a toddler meltdown or an attack of overwhelming grief:  they are all parts of life.  But the fear of being shamed is real.  A lot of the things that we would like to shame each other for are not, if you knew the internal state of the person, worthy of applying shame:  and even if shame were deserved, it is rarely helpful.

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A long time ago, I once got into an Internet discussion (not an argument, it remained friendly) with a fellow Catholic who was honestly, in the technical sense, scandalized by naked people in locker rooms. 

 I thought she was kidding at first, but no:  she thought it was a terrible breach of modesty and propriety that said something about the community of people at the pool where she had recently started to take her kids  swimming.  She was horrified that so many women and girls took off their clothes, even their underwear, where other locker room users could see them, before putting on their other clothes.  Not only that, sometimes people would walk to and from the showers without even wrapping up in a towel, and this upset her.   She would have liked if there had been signs posted forbidding nakedness in the locker areas.

At the time, I was swimming two or three times a week at an urban YMCA, and I found this absolutely fascinating.  What on earth did she think the locker room was for?  

I asked what she thought people ought to do, and she answered that they should change in the curtained changing stalls. 

Hmm.  "What if the curtained changing stalls are all full?" I asked, and she said that the proper thing to do under those circumstances was either to wait, or perhaps to change in the toilet stalls.

A little more querying and I learned that she had not, in her life, spent a lot of time in a variety of different locker rooms, and the ones that she had spent time in were large and comfortable ones with an abundance of individual curtained changing stalls and separate curtained showers.  Consequently, the culture in those gyms, at least in the women's and girls' locker rooms, it would have seemed gratuitously exhibitionist to change out in the open among the lockers.  You could always wait just a few minutes for one to open up, and if you were in a hurry, you could always lock yourself in one of the many individual toilet stalls.

My gym is small and the locker room has zero changing stalls and only two toilets.  "How many toilet stalls are there in your gym locker room?" I asked.  "What if everybody changed in there?  Would there be any left for someone who needed to use the toilet?"  And she paused, because she had not considered this.  (Really!)  

Sometimes you have to take responsibility for your own comfort, and extend to other people the courtesy of ignoring them.  I think locker rooms are a good example of these, and .  Clearly there isn't a uniform sense of what is and isn't proper.   If there are a limited number of private spaces available, why not leave them free for the occasional person who feels a real need for shelter from staring—there are lots of reasons why someone might, like trauma or internalized body shame or a health issue—and just offer everyone around you a modicum of privacy by keeping your eyes more or less to yourself?  

Anyone who is tempted to annoyance, repugnance, tale-bearing, or judgmentalism might find it a useful self-discipline, beyond the locker room.

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The practice of keeping your eyes on your own work, laudable as it may be in some circumstances, exists in tension with our role as our brother's keeper, of course.  We need to check in with each other, sometimes step in to correct or intervene or offer a hand of assistance, or seek the help of someone else appointed for the task.  And sometimes we have a special responsibility to act, though far less often than some folks seem to think they do.  I think it can be hard to know when to act and when to mind your own business, sometimes, and people can err in good faith both one way or the other.

Still... the good faith being perhaps not sufficient, it's necessary.  So I'm going to watch out for that little voice of indignance that creeps up from time to time... and my resolution is to refuse to listen to it.  Custody of the heart comes first.

Bubbling.

Yesterday, after six long months apart, we finally rejoined H. and her kids for co-schooling at my house.

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We had plenty of time over the summer to figure out what we were going to do.   Back when winter was yielding to spring, our little school gatherings (being more than ten people) were outright prohibited.   We slowed down, met with each others' kids over the phone and over Discord, stretched the end of last year into midsummer.    We thought about meeting outdoors, masked and distanced, but knew there was no way we could keep enough control over the six-year-olds for that to work.   Even after small gatherings were no longer outright prohibited, we stayed cautiously away.  There were visits to elderly relatives expected; there were sons visiting from college; we thought it best not to mix our family's risks, all summer long.

H. and I met a few times, outdoors and masked.  We took a long walk and hashed out our plans.  From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, we figured, there would be no visits to grandparents; there would be little or nothing in the way of social events; the young men in college hope to be staying away.   Our partners work similar jobs that expose them occasionally to the corporate workplace, but nothing more.  Neither family is attending religious services.  One teenager has a convenience-store job, so there's that; but otherwise, our risk profiles---between Labor Day and Thanksgiving---are similar.  And so we decided to merge bubbles, from Labor Day to Thanksgiving (as long as no one appears sick or learns of exposure).  And start co-schooling again:  three first-graders, one fifth-grader, one ninth-grader, one tenth-grader.

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You should have seen the shrieks and hugs when the little friends saw each other for the first time, the reunion on my front steps.  The bigger people tiptoed sheepishly around each other, flinching. 

Can it really be okay to step into your house? 

Can it really be okay to stand close enough to hand you a cup of coffee?  

Well, we cannot be sure it is okay, but we have tried to increase the odds as much as we can.  We have pulled back everywhere else. And it is a blessed relief to know that---now that we've let the hammer fall---we might as well let the children wrestle, we might as well eat lunch together at the same small table, we might as well pass the cucumbers and butter the children's bread for them, we might as well sit close together and sing out amem, ames, amet.  

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Once we got settled into teaching, we both felt more comfortable, and we made it through our whole day with time to spare, enough time to sit on my new socially distanced porch furniture---but all clustered together at one end--- and have a pot of tea and chat about how it had gone.   

And how had it gone?

Normal.  So much normal.  So much utterly craveable normal.  Just that.  So very valuable, an environment that we are used to, that we know how to teach the children in, that we know how to be together in.

And of course as we talked about the upcoming weekend there was the rush of delight when we realized that, in fact, we can get together this weekend.  Because, having made the leap, the marginal risk is now quite small.  And so maybe we will come over, bearing potluck dishes and wine, and let our children run around in the yard.  I don't know, we have to decide, but something can happen.  It is almost giddy.

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One of my children came into our bed weeping, Thursday night, because Thursday had been so wonderful that he couldn't bear to have a day that wasn't Thursday.  We soothed him:  Friday would be regular, just us in our house, but we would see them again soon.  And eventually he went to sleep. 

I lay there a bit longer in the dark after his sniffles had faded away, thinking that there was something of that in my own heart too, a bit of a scrap of loose end.  I decided (not to over-dramatize the pandemic) it is like when you come to the end of a post-apocalyptic novel, like Station Eleven or World War Z, and the author has decided to end the novel in the happiest way possible, by providing a little beam of hopeful evidence that things are going to get better.  It is nice to have a happy ending, and I much prefer my dystopias to have a bit of hope at the end.  But you know, those endings can never be much better than wistful.  There is a bit of hope and happiness, or hoped-for happiness, there.  But it's not the real happy ending you wished could be, the one where things go back to the way they were before.  There is still a long road ahead for the characters, a road that remains unseen now that the book is closed.  

And we have a long road ahead too, and we don't see it.  Still, the hope is real, and when the hopeful event is present, it isn't just hope but joy.  So.  We are going to enjoy it, each time we get a chance.  And in between, keep hoping.

 

On detraction.

One day last week I felt like writing for once. But I couldn't form my many roaming thoughts into anything coherent, so instead I opened up my copy of Introduction à la Vie Devote and started translating one of the chapters, the one entitled "De la médisance:"  "On detraction."  Or perhaps, "On speaking ill of people."   

Translation for fun is a pleasant exercise when one feels creative but not too creative:  a comfortable tension between being scrupulously exact, and rendering into modern English.  And a text like this is not quite as difficult as translating poetry, but it still contains enough interesting imagery, allusions, and the like to allow for a little poetic interpretation.  Of course, diving into theology (even a theology for the practical layperson) is a bit risky, so I hope you all understand that this text carries no official stamp.

St. Bernard says that the one who defames and the one who listens are both possessed by the devil, who has one by the tongue and the other by the ear.   The detractor's tongue, forked and sharp (says David) like a serpent's, strikes twice:  poisoning at one stroke both the listener's ear and the victim's reputation.

I beg you then, dear Philothea, never to defame anyone, neither directly nor indirectly: 

• take care never to impute against your neighbor false crimes or sins;
• nor to reveal those that are secret, nor to exaggerate those that are apparent;
• not to put a bad spin on a good work, nor to deny the good that you know to be there in someone, nor to maliciously omit it, nor to minimize it by yor words;

for in all these different ways you would greatly offend God, but especially in making false accusations and denying the truth to the point of harming your neighbor.  For it is a double sin to lie and, in doing so, to harm another person.

Our city experienced a second, short burst of anger, with destruction and looting, not long ago:  a man suspected (correctly, it seems) of murder shot himself in the mouth, in the middle of downtown, as police (witnesses say) ran toward him with guns drawn; someone somewhere suggested the police had summarily executed him, an all-too-plausible scenario after George Floyd's murder; the spreading rumor attracted an angry crowd.  Police released a surveillance video of the man's suicide, and perhaps that was enough to send some of the people in the crowd away satisfied, but not everyone.  Large, angry crowds are not unlikely to contain individuals who feel like breaking and burning things, if they are still assembled there when dusk turns to night.

...Even if you've once seen someone drunk, don't say 'Such-and-such is a drunkard.'  Nor, just because someone was once caught in the act, call him an adulterer or a committer of incest, for a single act does not give its name to the actor... To take the name of a vice or a virtue, one has to have made it a habit and progressed some distance along its way.  Similarly it is a slander to say of a man that he is bad-tempered, or that he is a thief, just because you have once seen him angry, or known him to steal.

I turn again and again to the Introduction as my guide in ways of personal holiness.  I am always open to suggestions of other books that might do the job, but I've yet to find anything that offers such practical advice for Christians living in the world: 

Christians busy with many everyday duties and tasks,

Christians whose colleagues, neighbors, and loved ones might object to their practices,

men and women,

married and single and widowed, from the wealthy to the poor: 

anyway, Christians who do not live in a bubble.

Even when a man has been for a long time the picture of wickedness, we run the risk of lying when we call him "wicked." 

Simon the Leper called Mary Magdalene a sinner because she had been one, not long before; nevertheless he spoke falsely, for she wasn't anymore, but by then was a holy penitent, and so Our Lord took her side. 

The foolish Pharisee considered the publican to be a great sinner, or perhaps to be a cheat, an adulterer, or a thief; but he fooled himself greatly, for at that very moment the publican had been vindicated by God. 

Alas!  since the goodness of God is so great, that at any moment we may ask for his grace and receive it, what assurance could we possibly have that yesterday's sinner must be a sinful man today?  Yesterday must not pass judgment on today, nor must today judge yesterday:  of all days, only the last will be the judge. 

Thus we can never call a man wicked, without risking great error:  what we can say, should it be necessary to speak, is that he did such-and-such a wicked act; or that he lived wickedly at such-and-such a time; or that he is acting wickedly now.  But we cannot deduce from yesterday any conclusion about today, nor derive yesterday from today; and still less can we conclude anything about tomorrow.

Living not only in a family, but a neighborhood and a wider community, I waver unsteadily between priorities.   Not quite the dilemma of Martha and Mary, of activity and contemplation, but something related.  Shall I lay a shoulder, beside many others who know better what they are doing, to the nearest out-of-alignment joint of the whole structure of power and justice?   Shall I instead look for people, a person, and see what works of mercy could do?  Do I just open my wallet?   The wavering itself says, perhaps: wait, it's I who am disordered. 

Tells me:  Put my own house and heart in order first; I can't do anything of use in this state; I'm the very embodiment of a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

Though we must be extremely careful to never commit detraction against others, at the same time we have to guard against falling into the opposite error, as some do when in order to avoid speaking ill of another, praise and speak well of those others' sins. 

• If you happen upon a person who slanders others, don't excuse them with words like 'straightforward' or 'independent-minded';
• nor describe someone who's obviously conceited as 'generous' or 'fastidious.'   
• When you see someone dangerously pushing against appropriate boundaries, do not call it an innocent mistake. 
• Nor must you dismiss disobedience as merely a type of 'getting carried away,' nor arrogance as a type of frankness, nor lewdness as a type of showing favor.   

No, dear Philothea, you must not try to flee the error of slander by favoring, fawning over, and feeding other errors.   No, you must promptly and frankly call evil 'evil,' and lay blame upon blameworthy things.  In doing so we glorify God, provided that this be in accord with the following conditions.....

Truth:  Wading helpfully in makes screw-ups possible.   Probable, even, when the do-gooder doesn't understand the situation, or offers a kind of help for which they are manifestly incompetent.   The most dangerous do-gooder is the one with a loveless motivation:  the one who hopes to play the hero and savior, or to confirm their own image of the self, or to enjoy a side order of punishment and vengeance.

[First condition for calling out evil.]  In order to condemn the wickednesses of another without being condemned ourselves, it must be necessary for the good of the other:  either the good of those whom we are speaking about, or those to whom we speak. 

Suppose someone is telling stories, in the presence of the young, of certain men and women carrying on recklessly with each other; or describing so-and-so's obviously lecherous words or actions.  Should I fail to clearly condemn this wrong, or should I make as if to excuse it, those tender souls who are listening might stumble into something similar. 

These disgraceful things require my frank condemnation in the very moment, unless I can carry out this duty more effectively and discreetly at a later time.  

Justified or not, a certain awe in the face of my own shortcomings keeps me from stepping forward, even in very small ways.   There are many situations I do not understand—and how would I know, most of the time, if I correctly understand them?  Years of mortifying evidence tells me I do not know how to interact correctly with strangers.   And my motivations are always, always suspect.    

[Second condition for calling out evil.]  Besides this, in order to speak on such a subject, it must be my proper place to do so. 

For example, if in a certain company of people I am counted among the leaders, I might seem to approve of a wrong if I do not speak up. 

But if I occupy a lower place, I must not take it upon myself to censure.

Positive outward acts of justice and mercy seem only rarely safe from my blunderings, that is, when I stick to what I know well and keep to things in which I have competence.

[Third condition for calling out evil.]  Above all I must choose my words precisely, not saying a single superfluous word. 

For example, if I criticize the intimacy between a young man and a young woman, on the grounds that they seem dangerously indiscreet:  O God, Philothea, I must walk a very careful line so as not to exaggerate the problem, not even a tiny bit;

• if there is only a slight appearance of impropriety, I must say no more than that;
• if it is only a matter of simple imprudence, I will not say that it is more;
• if there is neither imprudence, nor a serious appearance of wrongdoing, but only something that a gossip might latch onto, either I will mention only that or say nothing at all. 

For my tongue, when I speak about my neighbor, rests in my mouth like the scalpel in the surgeon's hand, ready to make an incision among the nerves and tendons; I must cut precisely, so as to say neither more nor less than what is.  

There's freedom in uncertainty:   I choose prudence in the sober acceptance that it might really be cowardice, if only because I prefer it to choosing courage that might turn out to be recklessness.   

[Final condition for calling out evil.] And finally, in condemning the vice, I must ever be careful to spare the person as much as I can. 

It is true that one can speak freely about those who infamously and publicly make their sins manifest---provided that this be done with a spirit of charity and compassion, and not at all with arrogance and presumption; nor to take pleasure in the sorrows of another, for this betrays a vile, mean heart. 

I only except those who declare themselves enemies of God and of his Church, for those we must decry as much as we can, along with heretic and schismatic sects and their leaders; it is a kindness to cry wolf wherever it is found among the flock.

Still, though, there are two things left.  One positive; one, a double negative.

One, I had better act on myself, so as not to persist in the ignorance, incompetence, and self-love that I see in myself and that gives me reason not to take more action.   

I do  have a responsibility to learn about the situations in the world that require more justice and mercy;

I do have a responsibility to form myself in the kinds of skills that would make me a better servant to others, and to locate uses for the kinds of skills I already possess;

underlying both of these and primary to it:   I do have a responsibility to cooperate in the rooting-out of self-love and the cultivation of correct love; to decrease that Another can increase.   

All of these actually are positive acts.  They're quiet, they may be noticed by absolutely no one while the work is going on, but they are things to do.

Everyone thinks themselves free to judge and criticize a prince, and to speak ill of entire nations, based on feelings.  Philothea, don't make this mistake:  for besides offending God, you could provoke a thousand quarrels. 

• When you hear someone speaking ill of another, raise objections and doubts about the accusation, if you can in justice do so;
• if you cannot, give the benefit of the doubt to the intentions of the accused;
• if that does not work, be evidence of compassion towards him, and change the subject, reminding yourself and everyone in the company that it is only by the grace of God that anyone manages not to fall. 

Call out the gossiper, but gently; and mention, if you know it, the good in the person who has been so defamed.

Two, even if I haven't the clarity to see whether I have the love to act, I might yet have the clarity to see how I can love by declining to act.  

It seems pretty rare that I get the chance to do real work that increases the justice in the world, at least not in a way that doesn't risk going terribly wrong.  But I get so many far-more-obvious opportunities each day to enact selfishness:  to tear at, or at least pick at, the fabric of mercy and justice.   

There isn't much risk of screwing up by deciding, through an effort of love, NOT to do that.  Making tiny and thankless decisions to not act, to not tear down, to not demand adulation, to not seek retribution, to not mock, to not gossip, to not assent to mercilessness and injustice. 

Lay down the mallet; damp the gong;  rest a quieting hand on the cymbal.

 

The greatest commandments and the city council.

I am out of practice, so expect a somewhat stream-of-consciousness post today.

...

Today I listened to a relatively short homily in which one point went like this (paraphrased from memory): 

We cannot expect the city council to solve our problem, because our problem is sin, and Jesus is the only solution for that.  We cannot put all our hopes in them or set them above God.  Our problem will only be solved by conversion of hearts, and so that is where we have to look first.

None of this is false, and yet I went away troubled and unsatisfied by the homily.  Part of the truth is, I think, missing from it.

Surely one reason I am unsatisfied is the lone reference to the “city council.”  It is true that the city council cannot solve the problem of sin, but it’s also true that the words “city council” call to mind for those of us living now in the Twin Cities something quite specific.  The Minneapolis City Council is in the process of dismantling the status quo ante of the police department, and everyone, whether they live in Minneapolis or not, seems to have an opinion about it.  So I am left with a strong impression that the homilist meant that whatever we hope the city council might do, we ought to mostly focus our efforts not on influencing it, but on conversion of our own hearts regarding such things.

But maybe what was really meant was not to point just to city government, but to government in general.  That would be a more expansive view, and so less incomplete.  It isn’t just the city council who can’t solve the problem of sin.  Traffic and parking can’t; the state legislature can’t.  Federal judges cannot solve the problem of sin; getting the right president in office will not solve the problem of sin.  Only conversion of heart will solve the problem of sin.  Now, it is true that I do not remember ever being warned on the Sunday preceding the first Tuesday after November 1 that I should be careful not to trust in federal judges to solve our big problems.  But I am as subject to cognitive bias as anyone else, and my memory might be faulty.

Anyway, all that is not wrong.  We cannot set any level, any branch of government up as a substitute salvation that will solve the big problem.  There is certainly a risk that we might.  As the legend goes, progressive atheists want to set government up as a new idol, substitute central planning for morality.  I am not sure there were very many of those listening to the homily.  But the point is taken. Government is not the solution to the Big Problem.

And yet, even if we don’t fall for the idea that government can solve The Big Problem (sin, or if you like, selfish human nature), still we think government can be useful to solve, if not THE problem, then just A problem, here and there, from time to time.  How do we work to get our government to solve A problem without accidentally making an idol of it?  Without neglecting conversion of hearts?

If I look to the city council for help keeping, say, police officers, from, say, murdering unarmed Black residents, is that so wrong?  Surely what we really need is for a bunch of hearts to be converted so that no one tries to murder anyone at all, but do we have to see many more people die while we try to convert them?  And are we working on the correct set of hearts?

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I often think about the two great commandments, Love God and Love Your Neighbor.   Probably I should think about their content, but I often think about their number.  Why are there two?  Jesus says that in those two are contained all the rest of the law.  But at least superficially, one might think that they are also contained in each other.   “Love God” should imply loving His creation, including the neighbors, no?  And “Love your Neighbor” should imply the existence of a law of Love higher than ourselves, which must come from God, no?  So why do we get both instead of one or the other?

Let’s suppose we only had been given one, and see if it gets us somewhere different.

1.

If the only greatest commandment were “Love God,” then we would at least know to love God more than neighbor.  And that seems to go with other bits of scripture, like today’s, where Jesus says we ought not love parent, son, or daughter more than we love Him.  But without “Love your neighbor,” how could we really be sure that our neighbors even exist as real people?  What if they are illusions?  What if I, and the voices in my head, are all that is?  The voices in my head, or the desires in my heart, might themselves be God.  I might try to love God only by obeying those voices, or only by obeying my desires.

But because “Love your neighbor” is also a great commandment, I have a way to test the voices in my head and the desires of my heart.  If they tell me to hate, to harm, or to use my neighbor as a means to an end—anything impossible to square with loving the neighbor—then I know it isn’t God I am serving if I do what they tell me.  I know the god to be a false one.

2.

And what if the only greatest commandment were “Love your neighbor as yourself?”  Then I know I am always to will my neighbor’s good, yes, in the same way that I will my own good.  But what is my good?  What is my relationship with Good?  Who am I?  What am I?  If I cannot understand myself and how I relate to Good, how do I will and enact good to others?

This is why I also need the commandment “Love God.”  I am a creature, but not a thing.  I need God and am to love God.  And since I am to love my neighbors as myself, they are also creatures who are not things.  I owe my love, because I owe myself, to God.  And so I can also test my love of neighbor:  if I attempt to will and enact the good of my neighbor in a way that violates my own right relationship as a child of God, with my own dignity and my own duties, I have chosen the wrong way.

Conclusion:

The two commandments interpret each other, test each other, and together they test all the others.

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The two together are, I think, the test of most moral questions, questions of right relationship— such as whether we have inadvertently set some useful tool up as an idol.  Any tool, even a quite useful one, can be an idol if we attempt to obtain and wield it at all costs—in particular, if we are willing to violate the two great commandments.

Yes, even if we wish to use the tool (once we have it) to love God or to love (some) neighbors.

If you try to obtain the tool, or the power to use it, by denying or wounding or neglecting God—or by harming your neighbor, or using the neighbor as a means to get the tool—or by lying or deceit or cheating

—yes, even if you hope to use the tool to help someone later, or a great number of someones—

your tool is an idol.  Even if it’s the city council; even if it’s a federal judge.

 

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But... if you haven’t set it up as an idol....

....your tool can be simply a tool. 

There is nothing wrong with writing to my city council representative, or showing up to a public meeting, and telling her my opinion about how a future public safety department ought to be organized.  There is nothing wrong with me writing that I will vote for her if she does one thing and against her if she does something else.  There is nothing wrong with my voting.  Nothing about any of that is inconsistent with loving God or my neighbor, as long as I form my opinion with an honest attempt to serve the common good, and to spend my vote and my words and my work to get the best outcome for that common good that I can get.  And it doesn’t prevent me from hoping for conversion of hearts, or even working for conversion of hearts, in some other way.

Trying to make civil society better, fairer, safer, more just is not a risk of making it a substitute for God, unless you choose means that violate your relationship with God or your relationship with your neighbor.  And there are usually means available to you that do not violate them.

There are also probably means available to you that would so violate them.  And those means might well seem as if they will get the job done faster, better, or with more certainty.  Congratulations: this is what is known as a “temptation.”  They are common, and the point is to avoid them if you can, and if you can’t, then not to give in.

+ + +

And so it comes back, as it so often does, to means and ends.  We may use any thing—a tool, a structure, a process, an organization—to love our neighbors, giving them what is justly theirs, and to love God, giving God what’s due.

We may not use, or harm, a neighbor in order to get hold of the tool; and we may not deny or neglect God either.

If we aren’t breaking those commandments, I submit that we ought to be confident that accusations of setting up false idols are baseless.  And so we shouldn’t be scared away from using those means to try to protect the powerless, provide for the poor, and make whole the injured.

Or, for that matter, to reach and speak to all those unconverted hearts, even ours;  the ones that work together, maybe without knowing it, to embed the Big Problem—selfish human nature—deeply in all the systems we participate in, including the ones we want to use and change to lift the very burdens that oppress us all.

 

A declining sense of danger.

Here's something odd about me in the continuing weeks of the pandemic:  as time goes on, I feel safer, but I probably am in reality less safe.

I date my personal lockdown from March 15, easy to remember, the ides of March.  On Friday, March 13, we headed west for our Utah ski vacation, got a little way into South Dakota, sanitized a hotel room, and spent the night.  The next morning, after consulting some more with our Utah friend, we turned around and headed back home instead.  Early Sunday I went for one last trip to the grocery store, and that was it.

+ + +

All my plans, like everyone's plans, changed at once.  This is a situation that makes me particularly uneasy; I'm not at all good at changing my plans. 

I spent about a month actually afraid.   I had trouble eating, I had trouble sleeping, I mainlined the news out of Italy and New York City, I obsessively catalogued the freezer and locked the pantry to keep the children from snacking on our hoard.  (Lest you think I starved them, I provided a bin full of permitted snacks).  For a couple of weeks we ate only out of the pantry.    I didn't go outside except to take long solitary walks on empty streets, crossing to avoid other people, bundled in coat and hat that seemed to make my face covering and gloves more normal, just part of living in Minnesota.

And then it started to wear off. 

I arranged for grocery delivery.  (I washed the containers as they came in.) We ordered pizza, we went to pick up takeout.   We started ordering other things, first only essentials, later things just because we wanted them. (I put on gloves to cut open the boxes.)  

The weather warmed up and I went in the fenced-in backyard barefoot and barefaced.  I put the gloves away.  I took longer walks in the sun with the mask but no hat and coat.  

I started to feel safe again.

+ + +

I guess I only have the energy for so many weeks of fear and grief, compounded by a grave gratefulness that (despite worrying) we have so far been relatively untouched.  And of course, compounded further by anger at everyone whose incompetence, malice, or cowardice did its own small part to help this global catastrophe make a smoldering home in our country.

And then there is the bit about having trouble with changed plans.  Eventually our changed circumstances, here in the United States, began to feel like a new normal.  And I began to see other plans, coming visible over the old ones like lemon-juice writing over a candle flame.  A plan to stay home, to wait and see, to keep on keeping on; a plan to wait, likely till fall, a plan for this summer to be a lost summer, a quiet, stay-at-home summer, a contemplative, cloistered summer.  Anything happening could be a surprise and a bonus. 

We developed a new routine, punctuated by take-out meals.  Monday pizza lunch, Thursday casual dinner, Saturday nice dinner.  The groceries come on Tuesday.    We drank more wine.  The teenager's home weightlifting setup arrived; I started strength training every day, and doing yoga videos in between.

And in the routine, I found I could eat again, sleep again.

+ + +

Here's the really odd thing.  In Minnesota, we have not yet hit the peak.  The total cases are rising, rather alarmingly, and our testing has not caught up.  I approved of the governor's relatively slow pace of re-opening:  the stay-at-home order, the closing of schools; the buying of time; followed by cautious re-opening of businesses based on whether they could safely operate; the ten-person limit on gatherings, the suspension of public religious services.   Perhaps it's done what it was meant to, pushed the peak later, gave the health care system a chance to be ready. 

The delaying of the peak does, however, mean that every day there are more infected people, perhaps asymptomatic, out in the community.  It is objectively more dangerous now then it was on the Ides of March. 

And yet, back then, I felt, well, terrified, for myself and for others around me.  I just wanted us to stay in the house and not leave it, not call delivery to my door, last as long as we can on the canned goods and frozen meat and dried pasta.

And now, I don't feel that way.  I am starting to think thoughts about maybe, if I run out of something we need, going to the store (masked) and going in and picking out the thing and buying it. 

I'm not going to do that, because I don't have to.  Delivery here is alive and well and slots are not scarce, and I am happy to tip double or more what I did before.   Lots of places have curbside pickup.  If my toner cartridge runs out, I can order one online (along with a bunch of pens and paper and things, to save trips) and drive to the office supply store where a human being who works at that store will put it in the trunk of my van, which has a button-operated lift gate, and the human being will earn his or her pay while never having to come within six feet of me.  

But when I think about putting on a mask and driving to a store and going in to buy my one thing, it doesn't feel frightening anymore.  But it did before.  Even though now it's probably really more dangerous than it was then.

I think I have simply become used to the sense of danger.

+ + + 

An alternate explanation:  I have a lot of faith in my fellow humans, maybe too much.  "People are socially distancing now; they are wearing masks and avoiding coming too close together; the stores are emptier, and also the various shops have put up barriers and tape on the floor and things, and have learned a little about what works and what doesn't, so even though there are more infected people, the people are not getting as close together."

Problem:  no data specific to my situation.  I am only projecting, imagining what it is like inside the office supply store where I buy my toner cartridges, inside the co-op where I pick up a gallon of milk midweek, inside the coffee shop that is selling good dark roast to go.  I imagine that everyone is being as careful as I would be.  But reading stories my friends tell on social media, I know that my imagination might be wrong.  

Anyway, it's just an interesting observation about my own cognition.  Whether it's wishful thinking, or projection, or the soothing balm of familiarity, I feel less afraid even as the passing of time likely makes my reason for fear grow greater.  I wonder if my feelings will ever overcome my rational mind; or if someday I will just decide that it's time to go on with life, mask or no mask.  It's hard to believe that I might, but then, we are talking about the humanmind here:  we rationalize, we back-justify, we change our opinions all the time, and tell ourselves stories about how we were right all along.  

At least I'll have this blog post, to limit how much I can fool myself about what I was thinking today.

 

 

How I know I'm coming to acceptance.

I believe it is necessary and prudent--but I still don't much like being under the stay-at-home directive. 

I'm getting used to it for the most part, and have developed some compensatory practices. For example:   Did you know that you can freeze whole milk in its original plastic container, and thaw it again, and it will be totally fine?  I sort of knew you could do that, but I've never had a reason to do so before.  Half gallons are easier to deal with than gallons.  I built up a six-(half-gallon) buffer in the chest freezer.  Now every week I order one gallon and 1-3 half gallons, depending on how many half gallons we used last week; the half gallons go straight into the freezer and the gallon into the fridge; later, as needed, I pull the half gallons out and thaw them, either overnight in the fridge or in cold water in the sink.

Even though we are able to weather this fairly well in our own house, venturing out only for exercise in the outdoors and the occasional takeout dinner, I don't like it and I don't have to like it.  Every morning I wake up and in the place where my brain always says Let's see, now, what do I have to do today? I get this sinking, it's-not-a-dream feeling instead.    And that's without anyone I know and love really living in peril! 

Only the conviction that sooner or later, someone will be.  And that's bad enough.

+ + +

I probably spent the first month in a fog of being alternately pissed-off and anxious, and feeling very stuck there.

The fog is, however, just now beginning to burn off in the late-April sunshine.  I honestly think the improving weather has a lot to do with it.  There are green leaf-buds on the cherry tree now. 

I can sit in the patio chair and put my feet up and read, or watch birds and squirrels, or listen to the next-door neighbors working on constructing the patio behind their half-rebuilt, roofless house, standing open to the elements since the last time the contractors went home for the weekend and never came back.  Their younger children are playing, their older children are helping, while they dig and plant and lay pavers.  We chat over the high fence; we can look down from our second-story windows, right into their walled-but-open-topped living space, and see them doing what they can while they wait to come home.

+ + +

Two signs that I've finally started moving on with my life, in the place where I find myself.

(1) I'm starting to close out the school year, at least as far as grades are concerned.  

I know, grades are not terribly important for homeschoolers.  But my tenth-grader needs a transcript this year for various applications, and I'm supposed to include some sort of assessment or grades for some of them.  I try at least to give a sense of the student's relative strengths, and a sense of what has improved over time, not to mention communicating the true fact that yes, this young person has experience being held to some kind of standard.

And I owe an objective assessment to H. for the two teenagers of hers that I have been facilitating through Latin II, geometry, and American history.  So I'll be counting up how many assignments were turned in, how they did on the exams, that sort of thing.

We are not done with the year, not by a long shot.  And we may continue studying together past the ordinary end of the school year, if the summer activities continue to be canceled and there is nothing else to do, at least in those subjects that we've had to cut back on.  But I think that, like lots of other kids around the country, our high schoolers are going to get a grade for the first semester (or maybe the first three quarters) of the year, and then a pass-fail type grade for the rest.  And if that's the case, well, then, I already have all the data I need.  Might as well start pulling it together and writing up the narrative.

 

(2)  I finally stopped moping around and wishing I could go to the swimming pool, Pilates class, and running track at the Y, and started daily strength training and yoga in the house.

I'm trying not to feel embarrassed that it took me about a month to get my head on straight about this.  I'm trying to go easy on myself, because--considering my track record--it honestly isn't surprising that I reacted poorly to having all my plans changed at once. 

(I still can't really bear to go running.  Huffing and puffing out on running paths where I can imagine clouds of exhalations and droplets emanating from every other person I pass--the idea does not appeal.)

Here's where I lucked out.  My teenage son has in recent months taken to weight training at the YMCA as an interesting hobby.  When everything he was enjoying and looking forward to this spring was yanked away from him, he became so downcast that Mark cleaned out a corner of the basement shop/storage room and gave him permission to order a squat cage, bench, bar, and weights.   I turned over my old set of fractional plates and resistance bands, too.  And Mark helped him make a hang board to practice finger grips for climbing.

This was totally the right call, by the way.  He's a lot happier now that he can stay fit for indoor climbing when the gym re-opens again someday.  And it's an hour or so of time he can kill productively while stuck in the house, every day.  Yesterday he benched 200 pounds for the first time, which means that he needs more weight plates; it will be a while before he can get more, as every weight plate in the country appears to be on indefinite back order.   (Next year will probably be a great time to buy a used set of weights.  You heard it here first).

But as for me.... I am also, for the first time, set up to do weight training at home, in the time I have, anytime I want.

+ + +

Let's just pause for a moment and inquire why, even as I cheerfully told people that I would get back into lifting as soon as I could find the time to do it regularly enough to be safe,  I never realistically thought of exercising this option--setting up a home weightlifting gym--for my own sake.

All I am going to say about this is that it was not out of any expectation that Mark would object to the cost, or to the use of the space.  I just never took this option seriously enough to let it rise to the top of my consciousness.  But it somehow became the obvious solution when the teenage boy got sad about his gains.

I don't know.  I can psychoanalyze myself some other time.  I just wish I would remember to think things through to their possible ends more often.  There's some kind of barrier in there, and leaping over it is hard for me.

+ + +

Speaking of leaping over things--see that wooden box girder over the safety bars in the squat cage?  Mark built it for me so I can reach the chin-up bar.  I went upstairs and asked him to build me a box to put on the floor for me stand on, thinking of the sort of things that Cross-fitters use for box jumps.  He countered with a built-to-fit platform across the safety bars, which he put together for me yesterday morning.  It's got rubber foam underneath to keep it stable on the bars, and it just leans on the wall out of the way when I'm not using it.  It's very stable and lets me stand with the bar just under my chin, so I can use it for leg-assisted chin-ups, which is the only kind I can do at this point.

After a month of not even swimming, I am seriously de-trained.  I cannot use the oly bar for anything except to set it on the rack at the right height to use it for inclined pushups.  (We have an aluminum technique bar on back order.  That will help, if it ever ships.)  I am doing a lot of bodyweight squats, or squats holding a single weight plate in both hands.  Lacking dumbbells, I am doing one-arm rows by piling plates in a strong canvas tote bag.  The ten-pound plates have convenient handles cast into them, so I can reasonably safely press them overhead, one arm at a time.

It's getting easier.  Between that and livestreamed YMCA yoga classes for the off days, I am settling into a lunchtime routine.

+ + + 

I take my yoga mat downstairs to the basement gym, for friction and cushion on the smooth cold concrete floor.  I lie on my back on the mat to do static stretches afterward, gazing up at the unfinished ceiling, at the row of the family's downhill skis arrayed by size in their ceiling rack, where Mark put them away when we came back from our aborted trip on March 14. 

A thing that is a little daunting about this, that's never far from my mind while I am down there:  I literally do not know what future I am training for.  Training myself, training up the children.  Sickness or health?   Grief or joy?  Emerging, or hiding away for longer?

I don't know.  But I guess I have decided to bet that I'll prefer being stronger, whenever we get there, whatever "there" is.

Anxiety, or patience?

I told Jamie, who was writing about anxiety and OCD in the time of coronavirus last night, that I was going to find a particular quote from St. Francis de Sales about anxiety, and post it on my blog.  I knew I had read it recently (I'm reading Introduction à la Vie Dévote in the original somewhat-updated French now), and it would be simple to find it.    

Where was it now... something about doing the possible remedies and then trusting God?  I mean, it wasn't particularly profound, it was the sort of thing you could find anyone saying to anyone else, including lots of people who would never say "and then trust in God" but would instead say something like "and then let it go" or "and then let the universe take care of it."  There is definitely a chapter entitled Anxiety... let's see...  

I flipped through the pages quite a bit before realizing that in fact the passage is not in the chapter about "anxiety" but is in the chapter about "patience."

French below, followed by my own (quick, unscholarly) translation.  It's the second paragraph I was looking for.

Soyez patiente, non seulement pour le gros et principal des afflictions qui vous surviendront, mais encore pour les accessoires et accidents qui en dépendront.  Plusieurs voudraient bien avoir du mal, pourvu qu'ils n'en fussent point incommodés.  Je ne me fâche point, dit l'un, d'être devenu pauvre, si ce n'était qu cela m'empêchera de servir mes amis, élever mes enfants et vivre honorablement, comme je désirerais.  Et l'autre dira:  je ne m'en soucierais point, si ce n'était que le monde pensera que cela me soit arrivé par ma faute.  L'autre serait tout aise que l'on médit de lui, et le souffrirait fort patiemment, pourvu que personne ne crût le médisant.....  Or je dis, Philothée, qu'il faut avoir patience, non seulement d'être malade, mais de l'être de la maladie que Dieu veut, au lieu où il veut, et entre les personnes qu'il veut, et avec les incommodités qu'il veut, et ainsi des autres tribulations.

Quand il vous arrivera du mal, opposez à icelui les remèdes qui seront possibles et selon Dieu:  car de faire autrement, ce serait tenter sa divine Majesté: mais aussi cela étant fait, attendez avec une entière résignation l'effet que Dieu agréera.  S'il lui plaît que les remèdes vainquent le mal, vous le remercierez avec humilité:  mais s'il lui plaît que le mal surmonte les remèdes, bénissez-le avec patience.

"Be patient, not only with the obvious, dominant afflictions that happen to you, but also with the secondary effects and consequences that follow upon them.  Many people would gladly be willing to suffer, provided that they were not at all inconvenienced by it.  "I wouldn't get upset," says one, "about having become poor, if it weren't for the fact that it makes it so hard to help my friends, raise my children, and live decently, the way I would like."  And another will say:  "I wouldn't care one bit that this should happen to me, if it weren't for everybody thinking that it my own fault."  Yet another is quite delighted when some person bad-mouths him, and will very patiently put up with it--provided that no one actually believes the gossip!  But what I'm telling you, Philothea, is that you have to have patience, not only about being unwell, but about the types of maladies that God wills, in the place where he wills it, and in the company that he wills for you, and inconvenienced in the ways he wills for you, and so on with other trials and tribulations.

When something bad happens to you, counter it with remedies that are both feasible and in accordance with God; because to do otherwise is to put his divine Majesty to the test; but having done this, be ready with complete resignation for whatever outcome God is pleased to send you.  If God wills that your efforts defeat your troubles, then thank him with humility; but if instead he wills that the maladies grow too great for your efforts to overcome, bless him, with patience."

 

+ + +

I guess I remembered "anxiety" because of this very last bit.  It's slightly different than I remembered.  It's not "do what you can from what's permitted, and then trust God" but rather "do what you can, and then wait for the consequences; if they work out for the good, be thankful -- which is humility; and if they don't, bless God anyway -- which is patience."

It seems important in this time because some folks seem determined to put God to the test with respect to the malady we are currently being sent.  And not even just wishing to put themselves at risk, but other people.  I don't feel like linking any of the opinion pieces I am thinking about right now, but they are out there.

When something bad happens to you, counter it.  St. Francis says "avec les remèdes qui seront possibles" which is obviously cognate to English "possible" but another meaning is "feasible, realizable."  I took the liberty of assuming that he meant "possible" in a practical sense, not "possible" in a theoretical one, since the whole clause "qui seront possibles et selon Dieu" seems to me evident to be a limiting phrase.  

It's not feasible that we can eliminate every single theoretically possible source of contamination that could disturb our safety.  Not only that, but there's a point beyond which our efforts would no longer be "in accordance with God" --- if we endanger others, if we unnecessarily disturb and frighten them, if it gets in the way of the daily duties we really are bound to perform.  St. Francis doesn't give us a precise definition of the balancing point, just the principle.  Yes, we are bound to work against the bad things that befall us.  We are also bound to work against them insofar as it doesn't rupture our relationships (from our own ends):  gotta keep loving our neighbor; gotta keep our lifeline to the way, the truth, the life.

And then---this part isn't "trust God" as I remembered it---it's be ready to take whatever comes, a peaceful acceptance.  Notice that the acceptance takes different forms depending if the outcome is good or bad.  If good, we accept it in humility, giving thanks.  If bad, we accept it with... more patience, and praising God as we ought to all along.  Follow the flowchart arrow, it strikes out, elbows upward, back to the beginning.  Some new ill has befallen us; it is time, once again, to counter the new ill with new remedies, new remedies which strike a new balance, now in different conditions, but always weighing the possible against the permissible.

No point in countering the current malady with future remedies that would be appropriate for the malady we imagine might befall us later as a consequence of the efforts we are expending now.

Patience is what we all need a lot of, right now.

There's a bit more in this section, about how to complain about your situation with a measure of prudence.  Perhaps I'll do that later--- but right now it's time to start teaching the kids, which is, after all, one of the remedies I am putting my efforts into right now.

Physicality.

I've been blown away by how much I'm feeling the anxiety and uncertainty of the present moment in my body.  For the first few days after we decided to #StayTheFHome, it was an ever-present companion:  a heaviness in my chest, a shortness of breath, a need to swallow. 

It reminded me of nothing less than the brief stretch of months in my early twenties when, for no reason I could see, I suddenly experienced a flurry of panic attacks.  They came on for no reason; I'd never had them before; they came on randomly, triggered by nothing I could see; and just about the time I started to wonder if I should seek professional help for them, they went away and I've never had one since.

This felt similarly, but less intense: subacute, but lasting longer.   A claustrophobia, a desire to flee somewhere this isn't.  A generalized feeling of un-safety.

After a few days I had a time of blessed relief.  I was still thinking all the same things in my head, but the fog and paralysis in my body had lifted.  Am I better?

It came back again, lasted a whole day; then lifted again.

+ + +

I keep taking a daily walk in my neighborhood, which although fairly densely populated (houses and small apartment buildings, mostly) has little foot traffic, most of it walking leashed dogs.  The daily walk helps.  I can feel my spirits lift.  Yesterday was a day that started with the heaviness in the chest, and it persisted.  I took the walk anyway.  As I walked the long straight stretch of wide and empty sidewalk, on a street that runs uninterrupted from downtown all the way to the southern suburbs and on (not that I was walking that far), I imagined another weight. 

It was not hard, feeling that lump pressing down on my sternum, along with the chin-tickling fluffy scarf wrapped about my neck to keep out the cold, to remember all those walks taken with a baby cinched up tight, in the baby carrier or ring sling, high up and curled like a shell over the chest.  It is warm (I felt flushed with my briskness), it is heavy like the anxiety that seems to press down on me, it is compact and dense.  It is a thing I am carrying, a live-seeming thing, and in many ways it is a thing I am carrying for others and not for myself.

Deep breaths---They seem to meet gentle resistance, like a warm external weight, with a life of its own, burrowing deeper down and seeking warmth and tightness.

+ + +

I have often in the past sixteen years thought back to a time when my second baby was a fairly new newborn.  He was a "lungy" baby, and whenever he had the slightest sign of a cold would wheeze and cough so that he sounded like a pertussis patient.  I guess he was a little bit croupy.  (Later he was prescribed albuterol to help.)

When he was quite small, less than a month old, he had one bad night:  I could not put him down, or he coughed and wheezed.  Held upright, he breathed, a little raggedly, but contentedly.   I spent most of the night sitting up with him in my arms, surfing the internet on a laptop so I wouldn't doze off.   I had some experience with sleepless nights by then, since he wasn't our first child.  What I remember about the experience was that I was astonished to find that, although I could have asked Mark to get up and hold him for a while so that I could rest, there was nothing I wanted more than to sit up with him and to continue sitting up with him.  He slept and breathed comfortably if I was holding him curled on my chest, and the sound of his sleeping and breathing comfortably was a sound so beautiful to me that I did not want to let anyone else take my place.  I sat there in the chair, clicking around and reading different things on the laptop, but my ear tuned to the sound of that breathing, and feeling that constant, heavy, warm, peaceful weight compressing my upper chest, constricting ever slightly my own breathing, which itself matched the double-time rhythm of the wispy baby-breaths at my throat.

+ + +

That's what the weight of the anxiety almost felt like, in its physicality.  As I walked, I tried to put myself mentally into that place, as if this new weight were the weight of that small baby, reassuring me even as it generated that tiny bit of physical difficulty.  And it is not far off from the truth:  part of what I am carrying around is, well, all my children, and all the other people I love, especially the ones who depend on me.

But thinking of it that way was a comfort, while it lasted. 

+ + +

The weight lifted off me by afternoon, after two different teenagers' algebra lessons (from different places in the book), after making dinner.  I expressed wonder to Mark about it:  all the same mix of hopeful and fearful thoughts were in my head, but the heavy weight, the knot in the stomach, the cold fingertips, the deadened appetite, those had just left me.   Without any hint of why, or any soothing event.  Like hiccups, I just noticed after a while that they had been gone for some time.

I guess I just can't sustain the physical manifestation all the time.  It does seem that the periods are shorter when it envelops me, and the physically-normal feelings are lasting longer.  I'm getting used to it.  I'm glad for that.  It gives me hope that I can go on carrying it all (carrying them all) for as long as I have to.

 

Seasonality.

It’s Lent.  For the first couple of weeks of Lent I was still meeting friends, driving kids to activities, and having breakfast in restaurants.  I started out just making jokes about how I was “giving up touching my face for Lent.”  And then the changes came hard and fast; one week I was grocery shopping with gloves on, trying to get the slippery ends of the produce bags to open with the knitted woolen fingertips; then I was skipping trips to the gym; and now I have given up going anywhere at all, except a daily walk in the sunshine, apologetically skirting a six-foot radius around all the other humans in my path.  We have given up close contact for Lent.  It is a Great Lent, one that makes us wonder what Easter will come.

But the global spread might have struck us at any season of the year.  Would we find meaning equally well in each?  Does that give the lie to our sense of pattern?

Had it been during Advent, surely we would be talking of the darkness of winter, in sin and error pining, and longing for the light.  Had it struck in the Christmas season, what then?  I imagine we would be drawing a contrast instead; despite the sadness of having to cancel all our holiday parties and Christmas dinners and midnight masses, we’d probably be consoling each other with talk of the true meaning of Christmas, and making Grinch jokes.  Maybe after a few drinks we’d work a little too hard on our analogies and wax poetic:   giving up our freedom to stay secluded in our houses, for the health of the world, is a little like the God of the universe giving up a measure of dignity and freedom to become enclosed in flesh, in helplessness.   How about another drink?

Had it struck in the Easter season, what then?  I guess we would be grateful to have made it through Holy Week and the Triduum, before having to step away.  The newly baptized, the ones just received into the church—those of us who have been there know the peculiar post-Easter letdown even in a normal year.  All those months of preparation, the climax of the vigil, the sacraments—and then waking the next morning and just simply getting on with the Christian life, well, it can be anticlimactic.  Imagine, had this struck in the Easter season, being a new Christian, and suddenly no church to go to:  no persecution, just the doors closed.  What then?  And the rest of us would feel it too, the great nothingness, in the season that ought to be the fullest.  I think we would console ourselves by thinking of the invisible Church, the rest of it, the triumphant, the suffering, going on about their business of rejoicing and praising with nothing more to fear.  Taking over where we left off.

And Ordinary Time?  Maybe we would have thought nothing particularly appropriate, had it struck us at the start of the long ordinary season.  Perhaps we would think about how we don’t know the day or the hour; we are promised wars, and reports of wars, and signs, the sorts of things like earthquakes and pestilences, every single ordinary day; none of them will help us identify the end, because they will keep on coming, and we will keep on getting through them, however portentous they seem, generation after generation.  This is the ordinary thing about ordinary humans:  we like to imagine patterns and messages where there is only the stochastic march of random events.  Had it struck us in ordinary time, perhaps we would be reminded only that suffering is ordinary, and maybe this is a portent and maybe it isn’t;  but it doesn’t much matter, because our job is the same either way.  Go on loving God, and go on looking out for our neighbors just as we would look out for our own selves, and not give up on that.  Keep getting up every morning and doing it all over again.

I am sure we would have come up with a way to fit the pestilence, the lockdown, the isolation, the loss of our sacramental life, into our year.  Whichever season it happened to land in.

But darn it.  Doesn’t it feel that it belongs when it is?  Don’t we who keep Lent feel, just a little bit, oriented to it?

We’re told it will likely last through Easter and beyond.  When that happens, if we are still shut in, will we feel any change?  Will we sense the season?

A tentative distance co-schooling plan.

I texted H yesterday “Let’s talk later,” and then spent some time with a pad and pencil.  It’s difficult right now for me to concentrate; I kept looking up, reaching for my phone, putting it down again.  I was trying to think:  what, after all, is the point of going on with this school year?

But I have been writing, in various Twitter threads and Facebook discussions, comments to parents who find themselves suddenly supervising their children’s education at home.  And in part because the act soothes me, I have been writing things like “It’s okay if you can’t keep up.  Keeping up is a low priority.  The distance learning tools the school sends you are resources to help you.  Use them to help your kids have structure and a sense that the adults are taking care of them.  Use them to help your kids stay connected with their classmates.  Use them to reassure your kids that they are still doing what they are supposed to be doing.   But when ‘keeping up’ becomes a source of stress, step back.  You get to choose what works for your family.”

I don’t think we can “keep up” either, and I don’t think it actually matters in the end if, e.g., we finish the whole Latin book.  (After all, every other kid in the country has been similarly disrupted.)  What we need to do, I think, is just connect the dots from here till when This Whole Thing Is Over.  We can pick up the pieces then, adjust; but these kids need time to get used to this new normal, time to grieve the experiences they have lost, time to make up for the extra stress that we are all living through.   And if they aren’t feeling it, they may pick it up from us, and if they don’t pick it up from us, then we probably need that extra time too.

I just want them to feel that something normal is happening, and to relax into it and do the work we give them, to learn and have the satisfaction of learning.  The dosage might have to be different.  We all need more time.

+ + +

Giving ourselves enough time, I wrote at the top of the page, and What do we need?  The first thing to make room for, I decided, was a nice big block of time to connect with friends.  A dedicated time when they could use the computer or phone to play Minecraft or text other kids.  I would ask H if we could coordinate the same time for that.

Everybody needs some exercise and fresh air.  I would like to take a daily walk, as long as it is allowed.  Backyard time for the younger two, maybe encourage the teens to run or to climb in the basement on the climbing wall.

The 16yo needs driving practice, if that is allowed.  If we have a shelter in place order, it might not be.  We will see.

The 13yo wants to bake cakes and cookies and make candy.  I can make room for that, if we ever have a steady supply of groceries again.

I need time to write and connect with people.  Early morning is fine.

In between all those things, what of the school can get done?

 

+ + +

I queried the teenagers and they both said they would prefer to meet me in the afternoon and be left to do independent work in the morning.  Fine; I can concentrate on the younger boys in the morning.  Perhaps the online connection time could be from eleven or so until two or so, with a hasty but simple lunch in the middle.

After I called H, and we discussed how it could work teaching each other’s kids over the phone, I went away again and made a plan.

Gone is our block schedule with all day Monday and all day Thursday working together, the other days working apart.  Now we have set aside the hour from 2:30 to 3:30 each day, Monday to Friday, as remote checkin time.  Some of the days it is H discussing English, first the teen boys (who are tenth graders) and then the teen girls (eighth and ninth grade).  One of the days it is me checking in on the Latin students and then trying to do an abbreviated geometry lecture.   One of the days it is split between us: some tenth grade English, some geometry.  (And there is a single check-in she will do one morning with my fourth-grader.)

That decided, I returned to my schedule.  While I teach the youngers, the teens have the morning to do independent work; the computer time starting in late morning can be a carrot, perhaps, to encourage them to complete a modest goal set at breakfast.  The ten-year-old is adept at independent math, so that can be his post-lunch work.  After the remote meeting block, I can check in with each of my teens in turn for their other subjects.

I am positive we will not be moving as fast as we were.  I was having the teen boys complete two history assignments each week.  I am only going to do one to start.  I was doing geography twice a week with the 10yo.  I believe that will drop to once as well.  I think math can continue at about the same pace, but I won’t push too hard.  And I honestly have no idea yet what I am going to dowith Latin, for which I relied heavily on our two ninety-minute sessions of intensive group work each week.  I still have to figure out how to transition to a much more self-directed form of learning, becoming less teacher than tutor.   But I have a plan for this coming week, not a very exciting one, but intended to give me time to come up with something better adapted to our current situation.

Maybe the whole thing will not work at all and we will have to try something else entirely.  Who knows?  But we owe it to them to do something, and owe it to ourselves, too, because too much nothing is not great for anyone.