The font of all holiness

Water. A pleasant coolness in the heat. Relief from thirst. A sluicing mercy after a long hot walk. 

Every time I walked into my parish church, I dipped my hand into the font at the door and make the sign of the cross. The same font both my sons were baptized in. The same font friends were baptized in, six, seven, eight decades ago. I love the expansiveness of it all, a deep bowl of fresh water set into the century-old marble font — not some barely damp, crumbling, mildewed, amber sponge tucked into a tiny shell screwed to the wall. You could wash your hands in this font or give a baby a bath in it, reach in and splash cool water on your face. A reservoir of mercy. 

But now. The font is dry. We wave our hands under a spout and with a burr and a buzz, hand sanitizer spits forth. At least 60% ethanol — is that by mass, by volume? By volume, says WHO. This is our communion hymn now, burr, buzz, burr, buzz. Amen. I rub it on my hands, its sharp scent carrying memories of hospital visits. The church is a field hospital says Pope Francis. And so, this too, is a font of mercy.

---

Photo is from Japan. You wash your hands and rinse your mouth before entering a temple.

120 days, 120 miles

Crash and The Boy are off. Crash is back to work, for a short stint at least, and The Boy is off to graduate school at Large University Math Department. Our nest is once again empty.

Crash arrived here in mid-March, his job having evaporated, his apartment sublet. We made up the guest room for him, and he organized us. The glass board in the hallway became the call board with the weekly dinner and baking schedule on it and everyone's "call times" on it. Classes, recording sessions, meetings. The signs of the times on our doors: "Meeting in progress." "Recording!" "Door closed to keep cat out."

He left us far more organized than when he arrived. My basement pantry is sorted. The basement and garage organized. My kitchen cabinets! Nothing like someone who is a  professional stage manager to organize your process and your props.

It was a mixed blessing, to have my adult son back with us. I treasured all those hours tackling cooking projects with him, the random conversations. The planters on the back porch he helped me plant are a riot of blooms. But this time meant his professional life was in stasis, certainly nothing I could have wished for him. So after 120 days, we got into my Mini and drove 120 miles to a job in Brooklyn. A suitcase, a bag of groceries and his backpack and he was off.  I'm grateful for both the coming and the going.

And then I drove 120 miles back. Through a nightmare tangle of traffic. And in a moment of madness, Google routed me from Brooklyn across Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel, only to bring me to an intersection where you could see the entrance to the tunnel directly ahead, but not get into it. There was a (permanent) barrier. Forced to turn left with a pack of other presumably misled people, the re-routing said it would add 30 more minutes to my drive to circle around to the actual entrance. But at the next intersection, a kind NYPD traffic cop rolled his eyes, stopped two lanes of traffic and waved me right into the onramp to the tunnel. My gratitude was without bounds. 

Meanwhile The Boy was packing a UHaul with a vintage blackboard (math, you need a good board to think on), his trusty KitchenAid and a new queen bed. Between finishing a master's degree and a two year high school teaching stint and the start of grad school, he's been baking for social change. The local radio did a piece on his bake sale, part of series on Philly's grit and grace. 

Grit and grace and gratitude. Words to live by.

Dystopia or utopia? Mixed graces

I was the altar server at last night's vigil Mass, the first time I'd served since the parish had shut down due to the coronavirus. Waiting in the back chapel to process out onto the altar was like walking through an abandoned city. A breviary left on a chair, ribbons marking a Lenten Friday. A copy of my Lenten book, tucked on a shelf, awaiting the elderly man who left it there for the next morning's meditation.

Clad in an alb and a blue surgical mask, my glasses fogged over, alone in a chair set far back from the altar,  made it feel even more like I was in a bad SF movie. Would I look down at my hands and see some alien fungus suddenly sprouting there?

Despite this, the church felt safe and inviting. Every window and door open (yes, even in this heat and humidity) gave us a soundtrack. Trains passed twenty-feet away, birds chirped, rain briefly pounded down, leaves stirred in the breeze. It wasn't distracting so much as the contrast intensified the silence within. 

The church's architecture is such that with the doors and windows open it felts as if the church's vault is suspended a few feet off the ground. We were entirely contained in God.

Prayers for wearing a face mask

At PrayTell, Rita Ferrone has written a beautiful prayer for the blessing of face masks. 

As I sat in the back of church on Saturday, I wondered about prayers for the wearing of a face mask. They can be hot and uncomfortable, and I wear one not directly for my own well-being, but for the well-being of others. It's a cross we carry for others, should we not embrace the chance? 

Herewith, my prayer for the donning of a face mask.

Holy Spirit, whose very breath brought creation into existence,

Grant me the grace to wear this mask, with all its discomforts and inconveniences, in wisdom and charity. Help me to bear this cross which I carry for the most vulnerable among us. Hold us all close in your care and bring this pandemic to a swift end. 

Amen.

Corpus Christi

Pomona College's Glee at St. Peter's in Rome.

It is the vigil of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ — Corpus Christi — and I went to Mass. In almost any other year, this would be unremarkable.

Four years ago, I celebrated Corpus Christi twice. Once in a diocese that hadn't transferred it to the Sunday, and then again, on Sunday in St. Peter's in Rome, weeping as I listened to my son (and his college choir) sing Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus and stretched out my hands between earth and heaven to receive the Body, if not the Blood, of Christ. This year, I wondered if I would receive communion at all.

My parish returned to the public celebration of the Eucharist. So instead of curling up in a chair with my iPad and headphones, I rode my bike, donned a mask, purified my hands with Purell and went to the vigil Mass. No singing, but with every window and door open, the music was beautiful nonetheless. The birds were in fine voice, the percussion section well served by the cars driving over the bridge, with a whoosh and a clang. No entrance gong or hymn, but someone's phone went off as the cross ducked under the lintel of the sacristy door. The altar, our altar, firmly planted in the world.

No Byrd this year as I went up, hands open to receive what I have been longing for all these weeks, just a quick whisper of my name to let me know it was my turn. I still wept.

Space race

Mary Sherman Morgan, circa 1950s

I've been doing a lot of Netflix binging in the last few months, in part because I've been so exhausted at the end of a day that I just collapse into a chair and let the images go past. #pandemic 

Having Crash with us has expanded our repertoire. This week, we've been watching the comedy Space Force. (I'm a space nerd, so have also lately dipped into The Expanse and Avenue Five. If it's set in space, I'll give it a spin.) Space Force cuts awfully close to the bone, what I might five years ago have considered satire now just replays the real news of the day.

The last episode we watched featured character Edison Jaymes, a Goop-ish woman entrepreneur whose fuel is supposed to burn more completely and energetically, solving a problems she says, that the male scientists have been unable to.

 Spoiler. The fuel is a fake and they launch to the moon with the standard fuel.

What struck me about this is that this story line is also ripped from the news, but in real life, the fuel that the male scientists designed was the failure. In 1958, after a number of notable and embarrassing launch failures, chemist Mary Sherman Morgan designed the fuel (Hydyne) that would successfully carry the first US satellite to orbit. 

The ratio

"The ratio" on Twitter is the ratio of replies to likes: when replies far outpace likes, the tweet is radioactive. The ratio here is the time it takes to prepare dinner to the time it takes to eat it. It's been running between 4 and 5. In large part this is because we've been making more things from scratch than I usually do. Loaves of bread, tortillas, pizza sauce, pasta. Things I often buy without a second thought.

I've been doing more from scratch for a lot of reasons. It's given me family time, cooking alongside Crash has been a delight. I've learned new recipes and new techniques from him, including a great chickpea stew. It's been some alone time as well, a time off Zoom and my email and all the management I've been doing for classes and colleagues. It's been contemplative time, kneading a ball of pasta for 8 minutes is deeply prayerful, at least for me. It's a way to leave loaves of bread and boxes of pasta on the grocery store shelf for those who need them.

It's a reminder, too, of what it takes to put food on the table, not just the cost in dollars, but the cost in time. A homemade loaf of bread costs me just 80 cents, far less than what a similar loaf would cost in the store, and not quite half the cost of a loaf of sliced white bread costs at the Acme here. But thrifty cooking takes time and energy, both of which I am privileged to have.

My awareness is all well and good, but as Pope Francis notes in Laudato Si', the goal is "to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it."[19] I'm not suffering when I bake my own bread, but if the experience doesn't lead me to discover what I can do about the reality of hunger in my own community, in my own nation, then the awareness, painful or not, is for naught.

____________
The ten most needed items at Philadelphia food banks. More than 200,000 children in Philadelphia go hungry. Roughly 80% of adults who are food insecure are working, 25% are senior citizens. Hunger is linked to our society's unwillingness to pay a living wage to those who work.

Grieving Easter

So many of us are grieving our usual Easter celebration this year, the loss of community and sacred spaces, and then there are those grieving the losses of jobs and lives. Grief and Easter seem like they should be at odds. We somehow imagine that Easter joy should obliterate any mourning we might be doing.

I remember the dissonance of Tom's wake on Easter Sunday afternoon, the blaring trumpets and brimming light from the Vigil still sharp in my memory as I stood next to my husband's coffin in the softly lit funeral home. I believe in the resurrection and life everlasting, yet at the same moment I was standing before death's terrible stillness.

Jesus wept at Lazarus' death, though he knew that he could — and would —  raise him from the dead. He knew what the resurrection would bring, the share of everlasting life that Lazarus would enjoy. Even so he stood before that cold stillness, weeping. He mourned.

We, too, can rejoice this Easter, kindling once again the Lumen Christi, even as we mourn what has been lost. Easter's joy does not erase the pain and chaos of the Passion, instead Easter anchors our pain in salvation, orienting it toward life. We can rejoice, we can weep, for our God rejoices and weeps with us, even now.

___________
There is also this column from almost a decade ago on paradoxical celebrations of Easter with thoughts from St. Augustine: Flustered for Joy

Mixed messaging

Thirty-two years ago, early on Holy Thursday morning, I staggered out the door of a hospital, my life entirely upended. Twelve hours before I'd been hatching plans for a late night stop at a diner for sandwiches after a faculty meeting with my husband, who'd come down to pick me up after an evening faculty meeting. Now I was a widow, faced with planning a funeral.

My sense of disequilibrium was extraordinary. The weather was warming, spring was firmly in place, yet I couldn't get warm enough, and nothing was in its place. Everything was blooming, the trees were greening, and I was picking out not plants for the gardens, but a casket. It was not the Holy Thursday I had planned.

I didn't go to Mass that night, though I can't tell you what I did, or even where I was. Still in Bryn Mawr, I think.

This Holy Thursday tastes a bit like that Holy Thursday, off-kilter, filled with mixed messages. It's the Triduum, the most sacred of times, and I'm at home, not at church. The Pope is saying Mass in a near empty St. Peter's. The days cry out for walks, the advice is to stay home and stay in. And I think of all those staggering under the virus. Those caring for the sick. The sick and the dying. This is not the Holy Thursday any of us planned.

Their words to the end of the world

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. Psalm 19:4a

I went to Palm Sunday Mass in Detroit, or rather I opened a virtual window to the Jesuit community chapel in Detroit and immersed myself in their celebration.

As Mass began sirens could be heard screaming nearby, an apt hymn for these times.

Petals flew past my window, here in Bryn Mawr, laying a thick carpet of white across the back law. Palms before the Lord.

Have the audacity to hope, even from the depths of lamentation, the homilist pleaded with us. I hear Isaiah murmuring in the background: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for." 

The layers of voices whispering in my ears. "I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church." Here we are, if not together, one.

The intentions falling into the space at the bottom of my screen. Names and pleas scrolling past. Save us, O Lord.

Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

A rule for involuntary anchoresses

Crash is working on a podcast episode about Julian of Norwich, a late fourteenth century anchoress. Meanwhile, one of Crash's friends is bemoaning her isolation, she says she feels like an involuntary anchoress. She's right, of course. Our lives are suddenly subject to rules not terribly different from the rules of life kept by the medieval anchoresses walled into the churches of England.

Anchorites — both men and women withdrew into the walls of churches — were at their peak in Julian's time, some churches had a waiting list for their anchorhold. It can sound macabre to us now, to receive the last rites and then to be walled into a small room or rooms off a church's nave, but despite the walls keeping them physically separated from the world, anchoresses remained connected to and were integral parts of the local community. They received guests at their windows, offered spiritual guidance, and shopped in the markets.

Forthwith - my rule for today's cornonavirus-isolated anchoresses drawing on the Ancrene Wisse, an early 13th century guide for anchoresses, which was on my shelf. (Parenthetical references to the text.)

• When you have to take anything, your hand should not go out, nor anyone's in. Neither should one touch the other. (2-10)
• Do not go out to eat at friends' houses. (8-6)
• No parties! (8-7)
• Send only one person out to shop for food, they ought not to linger in the market place. (8- 31)
• If you have a knife or a piece of cloth, or food or drink (or face masks or Chlorox wipes), or anything else that would be of service...you should be willing to do without it yourself. (4-90)
• Keep a cat. (8-11)
• Dress comfortably, skip the wimple and wear a soft cap. (8-19)
• Read assiduously and at length. (4-82)
• Pace yourself. (8-28)
• Take a bath. (8-29)
• Don't snack between meals. (8-33)
• Support each other. (4-64)
• Be grateful. (8-32)
• Pray. 

____________
Crash's podcast is Missing History, two friends trying to answer the question "Why haven't I ever heard of her?"

Prayer in the time of corona virus

To-do list on yellow pad. Went for a walk at 5:30! #self-care

God, help us to lift our eyes from our books and lists and calendars. Grant us the eyes to see you in every encounter and every task in our day. — Prayer for the 4th Thursday of Lent, Not By Bread Alone

I wrote this prayer months ago, when I had no inkling that I would be spending these days with my eyes fixed on my computer's calendar and on my books as I scramble to retrofit my course to work for students now scattered to the four winds. My to-do list grows faster than I can tick off the tasks on it. Lectures to record, worksheets to develop, memos to write, deadlines to shift, forums to start, new software to master.

And the email. Out of the depths of my email, I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading. I wrote 30 emails today, over 100 dropped into my work inbox, not counting the junk. Please, O Lord, slow the torrents.

Grant, God that I might see you in the faces on my screen, encounter you in passing in my email, and experience you in the tasks that must be done to keep the house running. O Lord, I left a load in the washer....

The Long Retreat

R2Me2, my trusty microphone, and my tea cup

We are not quite sheltered in place. The college has closed, we've pivoted to remote coursework. I'm working hard to create a situation for my students that lets them keep learning in all the different situations they are finding themselves. My students are scattered across several continents, some home, some not, some in quarantine.

I got up this morning, showered, pulled on my jeans, grabbed a white turtleneck from the stack on the shelf, and tossed a sweater over it all. I flashed back to the 30 days I spent in silence making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, where each day I got up and showered, put on jeans and a white turtleneck and one of the two sweaters I'd brought. I made tea and prayed morning prayer. I went for a walk everyday. I didn't go into town or shop or read the news. I spent intense hours in prayer, then time processing it, in writing and with my spiritual director. All of us praying through those days joined together for the Eucharist each evening before dinner.

Now I'm getting up and making tea and praying morning prayer. I go for a walk everyday. I haven't gone grocery shopping or into the college. OK, I have read the news, but most of the day I've been so focussed on the things I need to do to make this work for my students that I haven't given the news a thought. I'm spending intense hours in class preparation, then in processing it so I can pack it up for my students. The rest of the house is equally focussed. And every night, I sit down to a meal with Math Man and Crash. I can feel my retreat habits kick in, attuned to the day's ebb and flow, holding a tight focus on the work at hand.

This retreat from daily life may be longer than 30 days, but I trust the graces of those 30 days in silence will spill over these more difficult days.

---

Crash is home with us because the play he was working shuttered after one night and his apartment is sublet, since he was expecting to be elsewhere. If ever there was a moment to have a live in stage manager, this migh

Loaves and fishes and toilet paper: love in the time of COVID-19

By Brandon Blinkenberg, CC BY 2.5

It's the most poignant thing I've seen in the COVID-19 epidemic so far: A four-pack of toilet paper tucked into the basket at the back of the church where my parish collects non-perishable items for the food pantry. Usually the basket is full of peanut butter and jelly, soups and tuna fish, coffee and the occasional pack of diapers. But on Sunday, there were four rolls of toilet paper.

I'd been to the grocery store on Friday, seen the shelves stripped of toilet paper. Yet here was someone who was not hoarding what they did not need this moment, someone who trusted that there would be some for them if they were in need. Or perhaps someone unconcerned that they might find themselves short sometime in the future. This is what love looks like in the time of COVID-19. It was a challenging generosity in a time when we are being asked to literally (though hopefully not metaphorically) distance ourselves from others.

I thought, too, of the loaves and fishes. Four rolls? Against the needs of how many this week or next who will need help? Will the rolls multiply at need? Perhaps not, but their presence has made me think how can I be a multiplier of what is needed — without being an incubator multiplying the virus.

____________
What am I hanging on to that I need to loose my grip on so that those in need might have it? What can I give up to keep people safe? My in-person classes, going to Mass?