Today is a fast day in our Archdiocese, declared by the archbishop, a response to the pandemic. It’s the same rules as Good Friday or Ash Wednesday. I had coffee for breakfast, and some instant miso in the middle of the day with a few spoonfuls of leftover cooked brown rice and peas stirred in. We still plan to order takeout for dinner from some local restaurant; it isn’t hard to find one that will sell us a pesto melt or fish tacos.
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Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts of food, and prayers. I took a walk today while the kids ate their cheese pizzas: I walked south until I finished the rosary, and then on my way back a Divine Mercy chaplet.
It’s Wednesday, and that’s the Glorious Mysteries, but every single time (n=1,…5) that I started a decade, I said “The n-th Sorrowful Mystery” by mistake and had to correct myself. And what stood out to me wasn’t the glory at all, but the moments of sheer confusion.
They have taken my lord away, and we don’t know where they have put him.
they were looking intently at the sky… “Why are you standing there looking at the sky?”
They were all astounded and bewildered and said to each other, “What does this mean?”
I couldn’t feel anything at all except the confusion. I went with it, though. I know that there is a resolution, an explanation, in all three of the stories, but I sat, or rather walked, with the confusion.
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I am going easy on myself this afternoon, just as I usually have to on the ordinary fast days. I did housework all morning while Mark worked on his laptop in the attic: laundry, then I set up the bread machine, hoping the yeast was still good (it was). Then I got some hot soapy water and washed all our light switches and doorknobs. We have been quite isolated since we abandoned our trip, but it seemed like a good idea to start. Sooner or later someone will need to venture out to a grocery store or something, and they will touch knobs and such when they come back, and maybe by then I’ll want to follow the path from the door to the handwashing station, disinfecting.
After that I read and commented on blogs, and answered emails from friends, and checked in on some specially created FB groups. Before, I called that “wasting time” but now it is on my official to-do list, because it feels good for us all. And then the walk, and now I am resting, and writing on my tablet propped on a pillow on my knees. I don’t really have much energy left, though after breaking fast tonight I will probably have energy for something or other.
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St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction has a multistep method of mental prayer where you begin by choosing one of four ways to place yourself in the presence of God. If you are seasoned, the ways will all sound pretty elementary. The fourth way is to imagine Jesus in his humanity in the room with you, as you might imagine a friend (“I imagine I see such-and-such a person, doing this and that,” says St. Francis), and then you move on to the next steps. Usually I straightforwardly picture the presence of an adult Jesus sitting just behind my shoulder where I can’t see, but today on a whim I thought instead of myself sitting by the manger instead. What should I do now? I wondered, and the thought came, Pick up the baby, and I desired to and of course I can’t. And there was a flash of real grief, here and then gone… but strong, and I did not know what to do with it.
So that was a sudden felt longing. And an impression that pick up the baby is a sort of guiding principle that I can lean on in the coming weeks, even though what exactly it might mean for me leaves me, well… confused.
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