A Tale of Two Offices

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..." A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The office was full, the office was empty. I have everything packed, I have nothing unpacked. I once had two offices, now — incredibly — they have collapsed into a single reality. Things are still jostling for space, the beakers of Bright markers and sharp pencils patiently wait for me to decide whether they get tucked into a drawer or live on a desk. I sometimes despair of taming the chaos. 

Everything remains before me, even as nothingness blooms on my calendar. I have new projects hatching into those empty spaces: I'm learning to code in Python — my 7th coding language, a retreat to prepare and give, some exploratory noodling around for a new book. Older projects are simmering: two books in various stages of completion, a couple of talks on tea coming up. 

And there are tendrils of grief. I watched the Bryn Mawr back-to-school reel on Instagram and realized how deeply I miss the brightness of my classes, their energy, their curiosity that drove my own. I miss have that other space on campus to call home, where I hung my keys in the little cubby by the door and like Mr. Rogers donning his sweater, draped Dr. Francl across my shoulders. 

I ran into a former student this morning at the pharmacy waiting to get my flu shot (and my Covid vaccine and my shingles vaccine...I got my tetanus shot a couple of weeks ago thanks to the epic altar crash, I am awash in immunity). She came over, offered me her coupon reward for getting her vaccines and then vanished before I had a chance to catch my breath and ask her how she was and what she was doing. I miss the students.

"(Be)comings all involve goings. I keep musing about how Christ holds all these things in tension: birth/death; emptiness/fullness; light and darkness; dance and stillness….and perhaps that’s what it means to be fully human, to live in death and life, light and darkness?" 

I am going, so I must perforce be becoming? But what and how and when? Where I know — my study!

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My office shortly before I packed it up, and right before I closed the door on it. Last photo is of my space as a first year graduate student (a corner of a windowless office on the 3rd floor of what is now Rowland Hall at UCIrvine.) Until very recently the black and red organic chemistry textbook on my desk was still on my shelf.

The quote is me, which someone else captured and tagged as wise. 

Rearranging deck chairs

A futile or pointless task is sometime described as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” My study at home has been in chaos for months now. Between finishing off the manuscripts for two books and packing up my office at the college, I have just let entropy have its way. But I have been doggedly working my way through the stuff that came home: boxes in the dining room, bags in the entryway, bin and boxes and bags in the living room. All that stuff needing to find a spot to live (aside from the floor) or be gone…

Last weekend I finally emptied the last box in the dining room and have only a bin left in the living room. The rest has been shelved or stashed or sent off. Or moved to my study floor where no one but me sees it. Except on Monday evening I agreed to record an interview for an evening news show Tuesday afternoon, inviting who knows how many people to see my working space.  Something had to be done and fast.

Since I no longer have my college office as a back-up, Tuesday morning had me taking the semi-organized piles and really sorting them. More stuff went into the recycling. And hey, the Lent book and its Spanish translation have been proofed, so all those books can get re-shelved. Same for the stuff I used to prepare to preach this week. There were still a lot of piles, which I then lined up like those deck chairs in front of the shelves where they did not show on camera (I checked!). I did the interview (you can see it here - about the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that launched this week), whew. 

What surprised me was how much less cluttered it feels with those deck chairs re-arranged. I am not tripping over them when I try to get stuff from the shelves. Each pile has a focus, which I can now tackle one at a time. Sometimes just getting the deck chairs lined up makes a difference, if nothing else I have a clearer evacuation route from my study!

An examen for the present moment

My parish has been running a reading and discussion group called “Theology Untapped.” We meet monthly and over the summer we have been working our way through Pope Leo’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical is long (45,000 words!) and the conversations could only begin to explore the theologically rich and pastorally challenging landscape that the pope walks us through. The conversations provoked some passionate, almost heated, conversations. I had some thoughts (which were shared in the parish bulletin this weekend)…

While it is tempting to call this the encyclical about artificial intelligence (AI), Magnifica Humanitas’ principal focus is the inviolable dignity of each and every human person as a cherished daughter or son of God. AI may be the current challenge to our humanity, but there have been others in our history —  slavery —  and there will undoubtedly be more in our future. How do we respond to current technological developments, including AI, in the light of faith and two thousand years of Catholic social teaching? What serves our sisters and brothers, particularly those unseen and those living at the margins, and what strips them of their humanity, turning them into living, breathing widgets, where productivity becomes the principal measure of a person’s worth. That’s the question Pope Leo is asking in Magnifica Humanitas, and it is the question that’s driven some intense conversations among those coming to Theology Untapped.

How are we to respond, as individuals and as a parish community? As valuable as the discussions have been, we kept returning to the need for more than just words in response to the present moment. Yet it can seem daunting, what can one or two of us do to change the course of the world? Yet, as the pastor reminded us, the work of twelve fishermen arguably changed the world. Like the loaves and the fishes, what we bring to the table can seem like very little, but God can multiply our efforts. 

Pope Leo does not let us off the hook either. [sorry, I could not resist the pun!] Near the end of the encyclical he writes: “At this point, however, a subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices, therefore, cannot make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation…We all have our own areas for action, and it is precisely there — and nowhere else — that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).” (Magnifica Humanitas 212)

Pope Leo suggests five ways we might navigate the present challenges: “the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.”

One of those attending the last meeting said he was so moved by Pope Leo’s challenge that he was committing to reading that one paragraph of Magnifica Humanitas (212) every day. I was inspired to do similarly, making of Pope Leo’s path an examen: How have I wielded my words? How have I worked for justice and so for peace? Have I had eyes for the poor, have I sought out such encounters? Am I listening closely to all the world and not hiding within my own bubble? What might I do going forward — tomorrow — to walk more closely with Christ on these paths?

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Want to try a bit of an Ignatian exercise? Begin by reading Jesus’ challenge in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt 25:34-40). Imagine yourself in the crowd, what do you hear? Now skip to the end of Magnifica Humanitas and read the section titled “We can all do our part” (paragraphs 212-228). Imagine sitting down with Christ and having a conversation about the five paths and your next steps. 

They have washed their robes

 

[T]hey have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb — Revelations 7:14b

My sharpest memory of last Saturday's epic fall on the altar is the sound of the water cruet breaking. It sounded like I imagine a hand grenade might, more of an explosion than a shattering crash. I remember sitting on the floor trying to process what had just happened. Was I hurt? Nothing hurt. But the blood on the hem of my alb suggested there was damage somewhere to someone. 

Shock is a funny thing. Sitting in the small chapel behind the main altar I was still trying to figure out how I had managed to get a spatter of blood on the hem of the alb, when I turned over my wrist to see the blood soaking through my sleeve. Right. My right wrist was dripping. And now it hurt. 

Once the immediate things were dealt with, and the wrist wrapped up so that I wouldn't drip on anything else, I took off the alb. I didn't notice the wine that had soaked the left side. (Really, shock is quite a funny thing.) One of the other servers drove me home, and we wondered if the alb was salvageable. 

When I discovered the next morning that I would need to get out both blood and all that red wine, it looked dismal. But if the problem could be solved, I have just the right mix of people in my life to help me tackle it: chemists, artists, Episcopal church women, priests and deacons, monks, and mothers. I put the robe in cold water to soak and posted my dilemna to Facebook. My friends did not disappoint! 

I learned about WineAway (which might also remove blood.) Would salt do it? Club soda?  Peroxide? Oxiclean? Would that take out the wine, too? Or maybe the Carthusian novice master was right and the water would be enough?

I ran the alb through a rinse cycle in cold water. I clearly am not as holy as a Carthusian. The blood stains are all still there.  (Perhaps I should have used holy water?) The violet wine stains, though, have utterly vanished. On to the Oxiclean. I made a paste of the stuff and worked it into the stains using a toothbrush. I let the alb sit overnight on an old white towel. By morning some of the smaller stains were totally gone! I rinsed and repeated, fascinated to watch the stain move from the alb into the towel, like paper chromatography. Three rounds — how Trinitarian — and the stains seemed gone. A final wash, and I hung it up to dry. 

My alb, once awash in (literal) blood and in the wine intended to become (literally) the blood of the Lamb was white. It feels like a small miracle.

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Larger miracles. There are a lot of moving parts in your hand, and the glass managed to miss them all. 

All the advice reminds you not to put the stained item in the dryer or iron it before you are sure the stain if out. Don't set the stain.

I am sure there is a homily/reflection in here about sin and reconciliation.

Sacred laundry

“There are many helpful Episcopal Church web sites about getting lipstick off purificators and candle wax off altar cloths but nothing about removing blood stains from albs.” From a 4:20 am text to Crash Kid and his partner.

My soon-to-be daughter in law shot back, “This is written like the opening line to a mystery novel I would want to read!!”

Maybe this is the next book? The current mystery is more practical. How do I get the blood stains and the red wine stains out of my white alb, currently soaking in cold water? Just like in a mystery novel, let’s use a little flashback here…

I was the altar server at the 5pm vigil Mass last night. We had a visiting priest who preached a banger of a homily, and I was trying to be attentive to both those weird “unique to this parish” things for the visitor and to the ways he prefers to preside. So, you know, I was trying to be mindful and attentive to the liturgy. Pride, as we know, goes before a fall. And it surely did.

The gifts were presented, I took the wine with me to the credence table at the back of the altar to collect the cruet with the water. As I turned and took a step I caught my foot in the hem of my alb. Suddenly I realized I was going to fall and there was nothing to stop me but the marble floor. My training in how to fall (thank you UCI Dance and El Gabriel) kicked in and I tucked and rolled. The water cruet flew from my hand and shattered with a tremendous crash. In seconds the altar was swarmed by people. I am mortified, also wet. As they began to help me up I looked at the hem of my alb and saw a bright red stain. Uh-oh.

"Someone is bleeding," I thought. Then a few seconds later,"It's probably me." It was. Off I went with two parishioners who are nurses to the small chapel behind the main altar where we staunched the bleeding. Presumably clean-up went forward, but I was out of play. The presider came back to make sure I was ok, and told me it was going to be a memorable visit. Someone popped back to ask me if the wine had been consecrated. No. Definitely not. Someone else said that the wine was sitting, apparently unspilled and unbroken on the floor. (As it turned out, a great deal had spilled, all over my alb, but I didn't drop it and apparently set it neatly on the floor. Huh.) They got fresh wine anyway. Good. 

We hunted up a first aid kit to bandage things up so I didn't drip on my alb anymore. The pastor came. It's communion, the helpers went out to receive, the ministers came back so I could receive. (Is this technically allowed? Is it covered under communion for the sick? Did I satisfy the Sunday obligation? This is Roman Catholicism, thereby there must be a rule. No one invoked it. There are definitely rules in place that cover what happens if the priest can't go on — see De defectibus.)

I went home, carrying the alb. Math Man took me to the ER. It took four hours and three rounds of X-rays to locate and removed the glass embedded in my hand. There were jokes. Math Man sent Math Guy photos of the damage (to reassure him I was told). "Stigmata!" he chortled. The transport tech wanted to know if I'd been in a bar fight. (It didn't occur to me that I must have reeked of alcohol, all that red wine on shoes and pants, which were at least black. Parkinson's has dulled my sense of smell.) 

There were apologies from the staff that it was taking so long, and thanks for my patience. I didn't tell them that I had once been in that ER and not had to wait. It didn't end well. Waiting is good.  Except that waiting gives the ghosts time to gather. 

This morning I picked up the alb from where I'd left it yesterday and noticed the violet stains everywhere. What? Oh. The wine. Which leads to the question at hand: how do you get both red wine and blood out of a white alb?

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Odd thoughts: 

Is the clean up protocol different if the wine had been consecrated? Short answer. Yes.

There is advice about cleaning blood stains in First Initiation into Carthusian Life (a manual for Carthusian novices, mostly on prayer, but with practical advice on mail and meals and laundry tacked on to the end).  Soak in COLD water and the stains will vanish in short order, it advises (But only in a Carthusian charterhouse, the rest of us might need to summon the imps of Oxiclean.)

Spelling: the sign “waive here” outside ED radiology (to open the door) a place I visited repeatedly; the clinical notes say I fell on the "alter".

"In Residence" - the Shonda Rhimes mystery we've been watching. Lots of flashback. A scene where the White House chef Marvella smashes glasses on the floor, screaming "Broken glass!"