the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 21: A drawing

In real life, it took about fourteen minutes to do this fountain-pen drawing of objects on the top of my desk: a miniature orchid in a Wedgewood pot, a dish of seed pods, pine cones and a snail shell, jars of brushes and a feather. I hope you'll enjoy watching it take shape on the page in an abbreviated version. The final drawing is shown below and at the end of the video.

It's is a bit paradoxical: I was drawing fast, and aiming for a loose, energetic line, but because it requires focus and concentration to work that way, the process feels contemplative. Everything slows down a great deal; time barely moves, and I'm sure my breathing and heart rate slow too. For that reason it's kind of odd to view the process speeded-up 4x, but I didn't think anyone would want to sit through nearly a quarter of an hour of video, even though it would convey the contemplative aspect much better. On the other hand, I've always been fascinated by time-lapse photography and condensed footage, so there's that too.

I'll try this with some other art media in the future. Maybe I can get a slightly better angle next time that shows the whole page straight-on.

Still life with orchid, Wedgewood pot, and seed pods. Fountain pen on paper; 9" x 6", in Stillman&Birn gamma series sketchbook.

Hermit Diary 20: The Martyrs' Call to Us

Cross-posted from Daily Bread, the blog of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal

Today is set aside by the Anglican Church in remembrance of the Christian martyrs of the 20th (and 21^st) centuries. The book For All the Saints in our sacristy gives short biographies of just a few modern Christian martyrs: the Burmese martyrs of the 1940s; European Christian martyrs against Nazism; African Christian martyrs killed during independence movements; North and South American martyrs for racial and social justice. One of the suggested readings for today is an address given by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador (pictured at left) shortly before he died in 1980. I’d like to quote and reflect upon Romero’s words because I think they have relevance for us today. He begins:

"I am going to speak to you simply as a pastor, as one who...has been learning the beautiful but harsh truth that the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it, that the Church is not a fortress set apart from the city. The Church follows Jesus who lived, worked, battled and died in the midst of a city... It is in this sense that I should like to talk about the political dimension of the Christian faith..."

Whether we see the “Church-as-fortress” metaphorically or literally, the coronavirus crisis has forced us out of our cathedral building, and into a different type of relationship as a church community within this city where we live. On our Zoom screens is an array of faces into which we look, and which gaze back at us from our widely-separated homes. Rather than being one body in one place, we are being shown in a new way that we are diverse members of one body.

"Our Salvadoran world is no abstraction. It is a world made up mostly of men and women who are poor and oppressed...it is the poor who tell us what the city is, and what it means for the Church really to live in that world."

Montreal in 2020 is not El Salvador. Most of us would not say that “our world is mostly poor and oppressed” -- but the current health crisis is revealing significant inequalities even in the most developed and wealthiest societies, and between those societies and the much poorer parts of the world. So instead, perhaps we can speak about “the poor and marginalized.”

Some New York State senators recently wrote: “The novel coronavirus has been called a ‘great equalizer. While it is true that anyone can contract the virus and this crisis reaches all of us in some way, it is absolutely not true that the harm it causes is distributed equally."

In Europe and in North America, it is becoming clear that social disadvantage is a predictor of mortality. The reasons include poverty, low-paid jobs in high-risk sectors, less access to health care and supplemental insurance, greater dependence on public transportation, and other inequalities that result in poorer overall health, greater risk of infection and of more critical illness once infected. Some of these people at risk are also living in inter-generational, crowded home situations, where illness is more easily transmitted to the more vulnerable members, as opposed to the living situations of people with higher income, more space, and a wider range of options.

In the UK, and in American cities such as New York and Chicago, statistics already show that people from racial and ethnic minority groups are over-represented among the coronavirus deaths, by significant percentages. We do not yet have similar ethnic/racial statistics for Montreal, but we do know that while the early cases were greater in wealthier parts of the city where people were returning from travels, the virus is now spreading faster in lower-income areas. And the disastrous conditions in our long-term care facilities not only point to disparities in the care of the elderly vs. the regular population, and possibly to ageism in the allocation of funds and oversight, but also to the fact that the people employed to care for our elderly often come from disadvantaged populations themselves and are typically underpaid.

When asked about what has gone wrong in Canadian extended-care system, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said just yesterday that “one of the takeaways about the extended-care situation is that those who are caring for the elderly and vulnerable are, themselves, vulnerable -- often financially-vulnerable people being paid poor wages and living and working in situations that have made them vulnerable to infection.”

And it is not only in facilities for seniors that we are seeing these kinds of issues worldwide: the virus is showing the harsh reality of life in prisons, in homeless shelters or the street, in refugee camps and detention centers.

"...the Church has placed itself at the side of the poor and has undertaken their defense. The Church cannot do otherwise, for it remembers that Jesus had pity on the multitude. But by defending the poor it has entered into serious conflict with the powerful..."

Here in Canada, we are so fortunate to be part of a society with basic protections for all, and, unlike Oscar Romero, we do not have to battle unresponsive political systems that exist only to protect the wealthy and powerful. However, the coronavirus is shining a light on certain dark places where inequalities do exist, and where change needs to occur.

We tend to think of martyrs as people who have died for their faith, but really, they are people who lived for their faith, choosing that path willingly, and inspiring others to do likewise. Remarkable things can often come out of bad situations. On this day of remembrance, perhaps we can consider not only new ways to be a Church community committed to supporting one another, but in how we look outward. We already have a long history of helping the vulnerable and working for change through the cathedral’s Social Service Society, and more recently, the Social Justice and Environmental Action Group, and in our ongoing work and witness for sexual diversity, freedom, and rights. How good it would be if even more of us were inspired by this pandemic to advocate for the elderly, the imprisoned or detained, the homeless, the refugees, and the vulnerable and underpaid workers, and to proclaim all these missions more openly to our city and society.

Hermit Diary 19: A Spade

Poetry...why does it speak to some of us and not to others? A particular, or peculiar, wiring in the language center of the brain, perhaps, that gains satisfaction and pleasure from words being applied slantwise to ideas, or to forms that have concrete shapes but stand for other things?

Poetry has accompanied me my whole life, maybe because so much of it was read to me when I was young by my grandmother and aunts and mother, maybe also because I grew up with the language of the Book of Common Prayer in my head, plus innumerable lyrics and hymns and songs. Poetry and Music are sisters, and I've turned to them in all the difficult times and sleepless nights of my life. I read a lot of poetry and write very little; I accepted the fact long ago that I'm a prose writer with lyrical tendencies. Over the years I've become an experienced editor of poetry, which requires a different set of skills.

During this crisis I've been pulling one book at a time from my poetry shelves and delving into it over a period of days. Searching might be a better word -- for kindred spirits, and expressions of emotion and lived experience that feel resonant with my own. There aren't going to be literal parallels because this particular crisis is unprecedented, and that's not what I'm looking for. It's more a search for people who also walked in some sort of darkness but faced it squarely, and found meaning in it, or in spite of it.

That's different than looking for naive hope, or painting pretty pictures as a distraction. I'm grateful for all the beauty and hopefulness I see or am able to create, don't get me wrong. As a writer and thinker, I just don't seem to be able to avoid talking or writing or reading about the ignorance, cruelty, heartlessness, and sheer evil that are going on, especially in America; or the risks and sacrifices of the largely anonymous and often poorly paid people providing critical services; or the immense sadness that comes from this massive worldwide loss of life -- life in every sense of the word.

I wish it were different, but I'm not particularly optimistic about the future; we humans don't learn very well from history or our own mistakes, and most of us are primarily selfish and focused on the short-term. Nevertheless, love is always present, and where there's love, we can also find light and hope. Naive liberalism will get us nowhere; the forces arrayed against it are too great, and too entrenched in most of our societies and governments. I think it's actually more hopeful to avoid wishful thinking and instead see things as they actually are -- and find ourselves and our way forward centered within that reality. As Thomas Merton wrote, we need to cultivate the capacity to hold the darkness and the light together, simultaneously, because that is the way the world actually is. Certain poetry does that, and music, and some people also do it -- usually very quietly -- in the way they live their lives.

During these weeks of isolation I started out reading some Renaissance poetry -- Shakespeare, John Donne. Then fast-forwarded to recent decades, especially Seamus Heaney, Tomas Transtromer, and Derek Walcott. Lately I've been reading from my collection of post-war Polish poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rosewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski. After this maybe I'll turn back to the Russians: Akhmatova and Mandelstam and their compatriots who wrote under Stalin, and their heirs, like Joseph Brodsky. Or go all the way back to the Greeks. 

Here's Czeslaw Milosz, writing after the death of his fellow poet Tadeusz Rosewicz. It's not the most cheerful elegy. I apologize. But it gets at what I'm trying to say.

Rosewicz

he took it seriously
a serious mortal
he does not dance

he lights two thick candles
sits before a mirror
amused by his face

he does not indulge
in the frivolity of form
in the comic abundance
of human beliefs

he wants to know for sure

he digs in black soil
is both the spade and the mole
cut in two by the spade

Hermit Diary 18: Cat

Our cat, unlike the 3.5 million human inhabitants of this city, thinks self-isolation is the best thing that ever happened. Her previous life at our studio meant that we were with her during the day, but not at night, and she was cared for by visitors during the times we were away, so she had to deal with a certain amount of anxiety: Are they really coming back? When? The rules were pretty lax at the studio, though: if she wanted to scratch things, she couldn’t really do much damage, and there was no point telling her she couldn’t get up on the tables and counters. The view from the windows, onto a major north-south street that carries a lot of traffic, was not exciting. Aside from new contributions to her food bowl, the high points of her day were when we’d occasionally take naps on the sofa, or play with her with a string on a stick, and she spent large parts of her time curled up near us, or sitting in our laps as we worked. In the twelve years since she’s lived with us, she’s never broken anything; the worst thing she’s done is to destroy one corner of my upholstered piano bench.

When we moved her here, to our apartment, we expected a long traumatic adjustment. Instead, she did a half-hour reconnaissance of the entire place, and then settled down in a soft chair we’d covered with a fleece throw and started grooming herself. It’s still her preferred spot for afternoon sleeping, but she’s also claimed a corner of the sofa and our entire bed, preferably when our clothes or nightshirts are on it. During the night, she spends part of her time sleeping on J’s back or my hip, if she can, or curled up next to my side or between our heads. This has taken some getting-used to, on our parts, but she seems to be in a state of complete bliss: They're here all the time! They never leave! I get to sleep with them!

We were pretty sure she’d sink her claws into the velveteen sofa, and we were right. She looks with disdain at the scratching post we installed nearby, in spite of catnip sprays, and so we covered the most scratch-worthy parts of the sofa with wide, clear double-stick tape, which seems to have been a deterrent. The main battleground has been the dining room table. We said a firm “no!” but the minute we turn our backs, or turn out the lights and go to bed, she’s on it. Don’t tell me to spray her with water; she’s smart enough never to get on the table when we’re in sight. One morning we realized she’d been digging in the French butter dish -- a beautiful ceramic bowl with lid made by a late friend of ours -- that we’d left uncovered on the table. So we were careful to cover it after that. All seemed fine until a day ago, at 3:00 am, when J. awoke to a crash.

The butter dish was in pieces on the floor, Manon cowering under the table; she fled when he appeared and hid from him for almost a whole day afterward. I gathered the pieces, on hands and knees, and fitted them together; the lid was too smashed to repair, but the bowl seemed possible. Today I got out the super glue and carefully cemented the small pieces, managing to avoid sticking my fingers together or getting stuck to the pot, but somehow covering three of my fingertips with glue. As I type, I have the odd sensation that my fingertips are wrapped in plastic; I suppose it will wear off eventually.

We’re hoping we can continue to remember that there’s a cat in the house when we open the sliding glass doors onto the terrace, since beyond it is a street that will one day become busy again. She’s hoping we’ll forget; she now has a ringside seat for people-watching on the street, and sparrow-hopping in the hedge: I put bread out for the birds today mainly to entertain her, but she'd much rather be out there stalking them. During long sessions of claiming her place on our chests, in an incessant kneading of paws, she purrs so loudly and for so long I’d think she’d faint from exhaustion. Every now and then she looks at me with a gaze, more curious and grateful than reproachful, that seems to ask, “What took you so long?” and I have to admit I wonder the same thing.

Hermit Diary 17: Steadfast Love

Cross-posted from the Daily Bread blog at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal.

Well, here we are on Tuesday in Easter week, and though I know that Easter arrived on Sunday, somehow it feels like we’re still in an in-between place, more like Holy Saturday than the joyous, springlike, hope-filled Easters I remember from more than sixty years of life. I loved our worship on Sunday morning, many of us wearing flowered prints, pastel ties, spring-like colors, and even a hat or two. As cheerful as we were, and glad to be “together”, I think we all felt the absence not just of the Eucharist, each other’s physical presence, the choir and trumpets, the flowers and cakes, but of that sense of a completed journey that Easter usually brings. We don’t know what the next weeks and months will hold. We don’t know how long we’ll be in this suspended state of place and time. We don’t know how long we’ll be worried about what may happen to us, to our loved ones, to our finances and even to our beloved cathedral before this situation resolves.

Psalm 103, appointed for Morning Prayer today, is a hymn of thanksgiving for recovery from sickness. It begins:

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and all that is within me,
bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord O my soul,
and do not forget all his benefits —
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases

Those lines are surely what we long for, but today they still feel somehow… premature. When we look back at the psalm that comes just before this one, Psalm 102, we find the prayer of someone who is ill and afflicted. These familiar Lenten phrases formed the basis for some of Henry Purcell’s and Richard Farrant’s most memorable music, which we always sing during Lent:

Hear my prayer O Lord,
and let my cry come unto thee.
Do not hide your face from me,
in the day of my distress.

and it goes on:

For my days pass away like smoke
and my bones burn like a furnace
My heart is stricken and withered like grass
I am too wasted to eat my bread.

Yes, we can identify with that. So, are we still there, with the stricken psalmist, or has Easter come and filled us with hope? Or are we perhaps teetering between these two poles of plead-ing and thanksgiving, expressed so well by Psalms 102 and 103?

It’s impossible to ignore the reality in which we’re living. The mother of a friend died from the virus here in Quebec on Saturday. We’ve seen unforgettable images of hundreds of coffins be-ing buried in trenches in New York City, that hub of energy and life. Jesus died on a cross. Young refugees are dying in migrant camps. None of these things should have happened, and yet they have, and continue to happen now.

I’ve been haunted by the photographs of Pope Francis, praying alone at night in a deserted St. Peter’s Square. I’ve been in that vast space, waiting with thousands of other visitors to enter the basilica; it’s hard to imagine it empty. Somehow the desolation and poignant loneliness of that image encapsulated the spiritual question many must be asking: if there is a God, how can (s)he permit this amount of suffering? During times of war, people of opposing factions pray opposing prayers. But right now, the entire world is united in wanting this virus to end, and for lives to be spared. The emptiness of that square in Rome seemed, to me, to ask, Where is God in this crisis, and is (s)he listening to us at all?

I went back to Psalm 103 — the thanksgiving psalm — looking for answers.

Throughout, the psalmist speaks of God’s compassion and mercy, his slowness to anger, his forgiveness. No less than four times, we encounter the phrase “his steadfast love.” And this steadfast love is contrasted with the fleeting lives of human beings:

As for mortals, their days are like grass;
they flourish like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
But the steadfast love of the Lord
is from everlasting to everlasting…

It seems to me that this is what we must pray for: to be, during our finite lives on earth, an embodiment of God’s steadfast love. It’s what Jesus asked of us at the Last Supper, in his final message to his disciples: “love one another as I have loved you.”

Steadfast love is what I saw in the faces of our community gathered on a Zoom screen on East-er morning. And steadfast love also reminds me of Easters past, and the faces of my family and friends, many of whom are gone now, but who lived that phrase out in their own lives. Love for each other in the face of difficulty, love at the foot of the cross and at the tomb, love regardless of the difficulties, pain, and uncertainty of this particular time, and love that looks forward to spring, renewal, and resurrection, not just in the future, but every day.

Hermit Diary 16: Easter Day

The sun is shining here in Montreal, even though it's chilly, and we just finished attending a virtual Easter service at the cathedral, where the clergy and music director have worked hard all week to keep some continuity with our Anglican traditions for Holy Week while embracing the new technology. Oddly enough, I think we've sometimes had a greater sense of community than usual, being able to see a grid of live faces (rather than the backs of heads in the pews) on our Zoom screens and enjoy a virtual "coffee hour" after the services when we can talk in small groups or as a whole.

Yesterday I baked Greek Easter bread, with orange peel, chocolate, and almonds, and it filled the apartment with fragrance. I'm feeling a renewed sense of energy and purpose, so perhaps I'll be able to do some more drawing and writing, but I'm also feeling grateful for the opening up of time to simply be, and think, at a much slower pace than before. The anxiety and uncertainty I felt during the first week or two has been replaced by an odd new normalcy; we know what we can do and what we can't, we know how to get some exercise, how to deal with our food, how to communicate with friends and family, what the days feel like. We're still adjusting to living full time with our cat, and to having her walk on us during the night, or wake with her little face an inch away from our own: that is mostly a delight.

Sadly, the mother of one of our dear friends died yesterday from the virus. She was living in an extended care facility, and in Montreal, as in many other places, this is where the most cases and the greatest number of deaths have occurred. Over the weeks to come, we will all know more people who succumb. At the same time, spring is arriving in the northeast, with its promise of hope and renewal. What a strange time we are living! I find when I can step back from my own concerns and enter the mystery, challenge, and opportunity of it, something opens inside me, and both anxiety and impatience depart. We are living in a rare in-between space, and we are being called, I think, to pay close attention.

I send love to all of you who read here.

 

Hermit Diary 15: Masking and Unmasking - Holy Week 2020

I’ve been making masks this week. The sewing machine and ironing board took over the living room and dining table, along with bags of fabric, spools of wire, and thread, and elastic. Sewing is almost always a pleasure for me, and I tried to make it so this time, but I’ve never sewn something for such an ominous purpose. Underneath the cheerful bright fabrics lurked the searing images we’ve received this week from New York City, the UK, Europe, Africa, India. Images of human beings trying to protect themselves and others, often with the flimsiest of barriers between the invisible but potentially deadly: my breath, your breath.

This is also Holy Week, the solemn culmination of the reflective, penitential season of Lent. A season that got blindsided by a worldwide pandemic that seems nothing if not Biblical, forcing the religious and non-religious alike to give at least a passing thought to the questions, “What is going on? Why now? Why us?” The past two months have presented all of us with images and descriptions of suffering we will never, ever forget, if in fact we are fortunate enough to survive. One iconic image of this pandemic will certainly be the mask, and, if we are willing to look closer, at the eyes above it, filled with fear, exhaustion, and too much knowing.

Lent, and the journey of Holy Week in particular, is a time for Christians to face ourselves with as much honesty as possible. A time to unmask, to look within, to admit our shortcomings, to see how we can perhaps do better, and summon the courage and determination to actually do so. My own response to Holy Week always varies, and I can never quite predict how it's going to hit me. Sometimes I fight against it, feeling too weak or too belabored to be immersed in such a depressing narrative. I'm often angry at the way the story is interpreted, rejecting the evangelical notion of being "saved by the cross" and the atonement theology the Church has laid on this very human, very political story of an innocent man unjustly accused, condemned, and cruelly executed by the authoritarian powers who were threatened by his message of justice, love, inclusivity, and freedom. Other years I am swept away by it, unbothered by the parts I cannot accept, caught up in the parallels between then and now, deeply moved by the liturgies and music, willing to face the questions about human responsibility that I believe it asks of me. Occasionally, if I am able to stay within that meditative and receptive space, new insight comes. The mask with which I protect myself, the mask I always wear and present to the world, falls away, and a new face is revealed: vulnerable, expectant, grateful, willing and ready for change.

We’re all on such a journey right now, whether we are religious or not. Before we get to spring, before we get to resurrection and renewal, we are on an extremely slow, collective journey where the fundamental fact is death, and we are being forced to stop and look at it. Death stares back at us, and we tremble because we know that -- whether tomorrow or years from now -- it eventually comes for us all. But can we also fail to be humbled by the eyes that look out at us from the masked faces of the health care workers, the delivery people, the transit drivers, the janitors, the grocery clerks who continue to risk their lives on our behalf, while we shelter in our homes -- or to be humbled by the unprotected faces of the poor?

Most of us are unmasked by this experience: our leaders cannot hide their priorities and true natures -- some for better and some for worse -- and neither can we. But the question asked by Holy Week, as well as by the present situation, is not what we will do with death, when it comes, but what we will do with our lives in the midst of the uncertainty, injustice, and selfishness that are actually always with us: today, tomorrow, and every day we are here on earth. For a brief span, our masks are off, everywhere. What will we choose?

 

Hermit Diary 14: The Chaos of the Moment

We are all trying to adjust to the reality of this extraordinary moment in history, and in our personal lives. Some people seem to be adjusting faster, some slower, some barely at all. It's difficult for everyone. Let us be gentle with ourselves, and with others, as we navigate this thicket of fears, uncertainties, and complexities we never expected.

For some of us, Holy Week has begun. It's going to be quite strange. I found this essay quite helpful: "A First for Christendom: Holy Week without Church," by Stephen Cottrell, an Anglican bishop in the UK, who writes, "Who would have thought that this Lent we would have to give up each other?"

May peace be in your hearts, even as the world around us seems anything but peaceful, ordered, or even understandable, and may we find beauty in that chaos.

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 13. My Life Right Now

Desk. Pen and ink on paper, 9" x 6".