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.

Arboreal alarm clocks

I walked down the driveway yesterday morning, the cicadas howling in the humid air.  Classes, you need to get ready for classes. Their fall alarm seems so much louder when you've been away. This year, after a cicada-less stop in California, the sounds of summer fading to fall feels like an alarm going off at 3:30 am for an early flight, rousing me from the deepest of sleeps.

Usually the end of the summer creeps up slowly. The cicadas hum, the air gets misty, the leaves on the trees wrinkle ever so slightly, their spring greens grow dusty and faded.  The garden begins to look a bit spent.  I don't need my calendar to tell me summer is waning (though one of the astronomers at the Specola kept saying, "July is going to be over, it's going to be the 8th month of the year."  He was aghast at how the year had flown.  Me, too.)

It's been a good summer, with stretches of time for thinking and writing, time to explore some new projects and finish off old ones. There was time with family (wedding!) and time to tidy.  A bit of retreat time.  Time seems more expansive, perhaps because of the longer days, or perhaps because they are less hectic, more predictable.

And for the record, there is a full month of summer left before I begin teaching.  If only I could hit snooze on the cicadas, and blissfully go back to my midsummer's dreams.

Not quite ordinary

In a few hours we will be back to Ordinary Time, Christmastide having run its all too quick course. A friend laments the abrupt shifts from great feasts to ordinary time, at Pentecost as well as at the end of the Christmas season. We will sing of the three kings (in all likelihood we will sing "We Three Kings") with their exotic gifts and accoutrements who will then depart, taking with them all the verve of the season, leaving the Holy Family fleeing for Egypt and us in the January doldrums. As antidote to "We Three Kings" I offered this Bach cantata up on for the RevGals Sunday afternoon music. It was first performed for Dreikönigsfest — the feast of the Epiphany — in 1724.

But the music that truly helps move me from out of this season and back to Ordinary time is Arvo Pärt's gorgeous and haunting Anthem of John the Baptist. I couldn't find an online version, but it is on iTunes and well worth the listen. It gives me an entirely different way to imagine the scene of the two cousins meeting. Less outward drama, but inwardly a seismic shift.