the cassandra pages

What is Real?

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook.

Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It's hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation - not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I'm hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it's more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I'm trying to do is think about what's real, and that's probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here -- a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year's Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year - we've had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself -- its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance -- remains very real and very much itself.

I'm still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I'm comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don't have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say "look at me!," with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

To make things even more absurd, when the news (let alone social media) attempts to "move on" from these difficult topics, what they offer us becomes ever more bizarre. Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the danger of not cleaning one's navel; all the stuff that collects in there, the writer claimed, can build up to a point where surgery may be needed. "Have we really come to this?" I wondered. As if we don't have enough to worry about -- or maybe because we do -- does the news have to manufacture such absurdities for the already-anxious to obsess about? Have our powers of reasoning become so distorted and weak that no one even calls such drivel out for what it is? But of course it is only a short distance from our culture's obsession with celebrity and wealth and consumption to its hyper-anxiety about health and mortality amidst great privilege. Many of the institutions we once had more faith in, from the judicial system to universities as a bastion of free thought, to women's control over their own bodies, are under constant attack. Meanwhile the extinction of species continues at a staggering rate, almost unnoticed.

Many of us are struggling with the resulting dissonance between what we know to be right and true, and how much of the society around us, the government, and the media are acting. I don't think this is going to improve anytime soon; it is a feature of our world as we enter 2024.

Therefore I think it is a time to gird our loins, as the saying goes, and prepare for a long haul. Our armor needs to be whatever is the most real to us -- the people we love, books, art, music, our communities of friends, nature, animals, our faith if we have it -- and in continuing to do our deepest and most heartfelt work. We need to be prepared to take care of each other, to find hope in unexpected places and to share it, and take a very long view of the future.

 

Someone said to me recently that one advantage of getting older is having the perspective of years. I find that to be true. The world has gone through many dark times, seen many despots and dictators, seen wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters, and the accompanying tragic, devastating losses. And then things change. In my own lifetime I've seen many pendulum-swings in politics; I've seen conservatism and progressivism and conservatism again; I've seen greater justice and the backlash against it. At the same time, there have been enormous advances in science, technology, and medicine that have saved and improved countless lives. The Cold War didn't become a nuclear apocalypse. Children don't die of polio and measles; far fewer adults are dying of AIDS than we once feared. The story is not entirely dark, even when we seem to be in dark times.

So I refuse to believe that humanity is doomed, even though I may not live to see the breakthroughs that help turn the tide of what we're living through now. I don't know what will happen, be lost or irrevocably changed, before that happens. But I am going to choose to be a hopeful person while not being an unrealistic one, and to try to see what I can do in my own small corner to keep hope alive. Being more mindful of my senses is one way to immerse myself in what is real and present in each moment of life -- and it's the best way I know to keep despair at bay.

 

And the fight for rights continues...

It's a beautiful fall day here, and I went downtown with J., who had a dental appointment. Just as we exited the metro, we encountered this demonstration on St-Catherine Street. It was a counter-protest, in response to today’s anti-LGBTQ2S+ demonstrations by the far-right, taking place all across Canada. Hateful, strident, well-funded and well-organized far-right protests such as this are spreading across the US border and infiltrating Canada, and this makes me extremely sad and upset. So I was glad to be able to cheer the mostly-young people in the counter-protest from the sidewalk.

As the close friend of many people who do not identify as straight, and particularly having followed the journey of the trans son of a longtime friend, I am horrified for anyone whose life is being impacted negatively by the current wave of protest, legislation, and rhetoric ranging from misunderstanding to hatefulness. No one should have to live in this kind of fear, or have their basic human rights denied.

Today is also my 71st birthday, and I can't believe that not only are we still having to protest these issues, but in many cases society and governments are going backwards. Women's rights; LGBTQ2S+ rights; protection from discrimination because of one's race, ethnicity, or religion, or the language one speaks; the right of all people to have healthcare; the right to clean air and water; protection from police brutality and profiling; the freedom to read and teach the literature you want as a university professor...all are endangered, and I could go on and on.

Here in Canada we have been complacent, thinking that we generally have shared values, and that most rights such as these are enshrined and could never be repealed -- but we can't continue to think that way. I grew up with hope for a better world in the 1960s, and I don't want to live my remaining years watching as human rights are eroded rather than expanded, and the climate destroyed. We have to be vigilant, we have to speak out, we have to hold the institutions to which we belong accountable. But perhaps most important, we need to patiently and continually educate people who are afraid of difference that human beings are human beings. It seems to me that this is best done one-on-one or on a small scale, through the stories and examples of real people who we know and love as our children, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues-- and it can create a lasting change of heart. That process has to happen alongside the legal struggle to gain human rights and equality. We have seen the fruits of this process, for example in society's greater acceptance and equality of gay and lesbian people over the past twenty years, and the rights and dignity that women have painfully won over the past fifty -- but the struggle is not even close to over, people's lives continue to be in danger, many rights have already been taken away, and we can never, ever sit back and think the work is done, even in countries like Canada and provinces such as Quebec.

The Brightness of Flowers, the Darkness of the Sky

I've been sewing for myself this week, for the first time since we moved here a year ago, and it felt like such a pleasure. The fabric is a rayon viscose twill -- a remnant I bought in Lisbon 3 1/2 years ago. And I self-drafted the pattern from a favorite v-neck top, which meant looking up some techniques online for adding and eliminating darts, and for drafting sleeves based on the circumference of the armhole. I had to adjust as I went, a little bit, but it was fine.

The fabric turned out to be quite slippery so it was necessary to stay-stitch all the edges, use twice as many pins as usual, baste some seams first, and then finish all the seams on the inside of the garment. I did a lot of hand-stitching too, on the neck binding and the hems, which I do enjoy, but it's fussy. The result pleased me, though, and I'm sure I'll wear it a lot.

Meanwhile, we're at the height of actual spring blooms. J. and I have been dieting but we treated ourselves to tiny gelato/hot chocolate sundaes at Leonidas the other day, and ate them in the Pierre Elliot Trudeau rose garden in the Town of Mont-Royal, which is an easy bike ride from our apartment. The roses are just starting but the irises and peonies were in full, magnificent bloom, and it did my heart good, after these days of wildfires to the north of us, to see such beauty and color.

Montreal was spared the worst of the smoke and smog, but it was dangerously awful to the south and west of us. We've had a lot of rain the past two days, so I hope that will help the fires to abate.

This was my view on the worst day we had -- bad, but nothing like it was for many of you.

I was horrified by the photographs and air quality readings from Toronto, Ottawa, Syracuse, NYC, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. And before anyone blames Quebec, let's please remember that this can and will happen anywhere there are forests, as our climate comes under greater and greater pressure, with the fires contributing to the vicious cycle. Only the force of collective human determination will change the trend, and it is up to all of us, but particularly industry and government. Please do what you can as an individual, and let's apply as much pressure as we can to our elected officials, and support all of the progressive initiatives aimed at combating the greed, waste, and lack of will that have gotten us to this point.

Not Springing Along, but Inching...

Spring is coming very fitfully to Montreal this year. One day, warm weather; the next, cold clammy rain. It's pretty awful today. But forsythia is blooming, and the first daffodils, and the magnolias have huge buds. It will arrive.

And normalcy in our personal life also seems closer this year than for the past three. This weekend we had dinner at a friend's house and met some new people - what a pleasure! Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley's 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves -- Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 - as well as her sister, Madeline - and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine's history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city  where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn't grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me. All in all, Albertine is a brilliant and very moving opera, beautifully conceived and sung, and if you ever have a chance to see it, by all means do so - there are several more performances of this current Quebec tour. This was also the first big public performance we've attended in three years, so it felt like a liberation for us.

I haven't been painting or drawing much this week, except for the watercolor here -- the bowl of fruit on the blue-and-yellow platter just begged to be painted, especially the brilliance of the pomegranates. This was somewhat bigger than usual - I did it in my 14" x 11" sketchbook and used large brushes.

Instead I'm working on a text to go with the charcoal landscape drawing series, which I hope to publish later in 2023. Because it's personal, as well as being about the art, it's been rather slow going, but it's coming along -- like the slow progress of spring.

Making Sense Out of Chaos

Our houseplants all go outside on the terrace in the summer, and in the winter they're on tables near the front windows, under plant lights. Unlike the summer arrangement, when each one is in its ideal growing spot, shown off to best advantage, and augmented with flowering annuals, the winter situation is crowded. Every plant gets plenty of water and food and light, but there's no way I can give each one exactly what it needs. Nor is the arrangement nearly as attractive; we're talking about survival in limited space.

Because of that, I've felt a lot less compelled to draw or paint the plants indoors. Each is competing with the next one, so you can't even see the beautiful leaves of the begonias, or the lacy foliage of the scented geraniums, or the sculptural succulents. They're all crammed together in a cluttered busy-ness that rivals any English cottage garden for visual competition. Nevertheless, the other night, I just felt like something was prompting me to have a go -- maybe it was the felt-like foliage of that ridiculously enormous Kalanchoe beharensis "Fang", in the center.

I propped my watercolor box on the chair near my knee, and started painting directly, laying down one color after another, as quickly as I could, to try to capture the energy and chaotic over-crowding of the scene before me. The terracotta pots and wooden table gave the picture a little bit of unification and structure, but basically there wasn't any overall composition to be had. Nor were there strong shapes - just the big fleshy leaves of "Fang". The geranium in the background, the butterfly-like triangles of the oxalis, the succulents, and the busy needles of the rosemary plant were all similar enough in size to compete with each other, but not stand out. I just kept at it, adding brushstrokes, dashes, lines, dots. Once all the color was on the page, I went back with a pen and sketched in some loose shapes and lines, and finally added the vertical window blinds in the background with watercolor.

The only solution, it had seemed, was just to go for the visual clutter. Feeling dubious, I posted the image on Instagram, with the slightly apologetic comment, "Once again, fascinated by the busyness of plants." A little while later, my friend Michael Szpaskowski and I had this exchange:

Michael: "And that that ‘busyness’ becomes the compositional imperative here is great. Both truthful (I’m not saying that artistic truth is always of this nature of course) and very beautiful."

Beth: "It is both the compositional imperative and its greatest obstacle. The urge is to bludgeon the busyness into some sort of submissive order, but that wouldn't be true. So then what do you do?...I like aspects of it, but it still doesn't entirely work for me. Tonight I was thinking maybe if I tried it from a high angle, the ovals of the tops of the pots would give a compositional rhythm that might unify the picture a little more. But not sure if I have the energy for another try!"

Michael: "Oh it is precisely its ‘awkwardness’ that I find so winning!"

This was a very helpful exchange, because when I studied the image again with his words in mind, I realized that it was actually OK not to have a strong and obvious composition or structure; instead there's color and life dancing all over the image, and the loose horizontal and vertical lines do just enough work to hold everything within the frame.

Chaos is all around us these days. Here in Quebec, we're in a terrible situation, at or near the peak of the current Omicron wave, and the hospitals are overwhelmed. Yesterday, a government report was obtained and published by RadioCanada, detailing plans to stop trying to isolate COVID patients in hospitals, allow workers to return to work even if they're still ill, accelerate discharges, decrease the level of care if necessary in order to provide at least some care to more people, and even ask patients' families to provide basic care (feeding, cleaning, bed changing, etc) for them in the hospital to free up the staff to do clinical work. It's shocking that it's come to that; the whole system is in danger of breaking down -- and that's in a province with 90% of the people vaccinated with at least two doses. There simply isn't sufficient infrastructure to deal with this many patients when we don't have enough staffed acute care beds, and so many healthcare workers are either out sick themselves, or have quit over the past two years. And the government has also made a series of disastrous decisions, such as delaying the booster campaign until Omicron was already upon us. I'm angry about this, frustrated, and worried.

And of course, it's not just COVID that gives us all a sense of uncontrolled chaos: the news from the U.S. is terrible, Europe is in disarray, there may be war in Ukraine, the climate crisis envelops all of us, lots of our friends and family are sick, many of us have had health or psychological problems because of the unremitting stress, or delayed and limited access to care, we can't see the people we want to, or go where we'd like, and the future continues to feel entirely uncertain.

Is it possible, as in the picture, to simply embrace some of that craziness and uncertainty, instead of -- as I wrote to Michael, "trying to bludgeon the busyness into some sort of submissive order"? Can we sit with it, and even find some beauty and truth there? That's a hard task, but it seems to me that it's more realistic -- and potentially more helpful -- than fighting and resisting what is.

Since Christmas, I've been starting each day with half an hour of yoga practice. Doing this regularly is new to me. I can feel my body responding slowly to the daily movements: already I'm a little bit stronger, more flexible, with better balance. But I think I've been helped equally by the mental discipline of a daily commitment, conscious breathing, and then the attentive relaxation at the end, followed by some time on my mat and cushion in meditation - even if it's just five minutes of awareness and gratitude for being here, right now. It makes a difference. I still get upset, but I can see that, like the gradual body changes, there's a gradual emotional shift toward greater equanimity in spite of what's going on around me.

There are other ways to encourage a shift: we all need to find what works for ourselves. The only point I'm trying to make is that when we can't change the big, chaotic, confusing, intractable external things, sometimes there is potential movement inside ourselves -- if we're willing to change old habits and ideas, and experiment a little.

Lights on at 1 pm: Winter Solstice

The shortest day of the year was a sunny one in Montreal, at least for the brief daylight hours. I started this quick watercolor after lunch, and noticed that the park lights came on at 1 pm! It's 3:45 now, and the sun is going down - there are just some last rays on the tops of the trees, and white snow on the ground that looks as though it might stay. If I ever forget how far north we live, the solstice reminds me.

The day may have been sunny, but the mood in the city definitely is not, as we battle an Omicron surge that is frightening in its speed and intensity of transmission. Many restrictions have been put in place already by the province, including closing the schools, and our mairesse, Valerie Plante, has declared a state of emergency from her home, where she is isolating after testing positive herself. The hospital emergency rooms are already near capacity.

My Christmas wish to all of you is to that you won't disregard the threat of this variant. The behavior you've adopted that has kept you safe so far is probably not enough to avoid infection. Please get a booster if you're eligible; wear a high-quality or a double mask; keep your social contacts and your errands in public places to a minimum. The exponential rise in cases we are seeing here is astounding, and half or more of those admitted to hospital are now double-vaccinated people.  Booster roll-out has been slow in Canada; here in Quebec only the elderly have received third doses, and people above 65 have just recently become eligible to make appointments -- the virus is taking full advantage of that fact. (My own appointment is scheduled for December 27.) And while hospitalizations are about a third of the level they were with the first wave, and deaths are still fairly low, the danger is not just to the elderly or vulnerable, or the unvaccinated. A two-month old baby died of COVID in hospital here last week. Please, be very cautious, and if you live in a place where Omicron has not yet hit, think very carefully about your holiday plans, who you will be seeing, and what it means to love them, because with this variant, everything can change in a week or less. This is one year when the pressure or desire to visit one's family should take a back seat to protecting them. I say this particularly to my friends in the U.S., many of whom still seem oblivious to what we are going through up here -- and it's not even the worst of it yet -- or what people in Europe are going through.

So it will be a different Christmas, once again...we have a tree, and lights, and the smells of baking; there's snow outside and warmth inside, but the holiday will be a quiet one. I'm sure we'll check in with friends and family via zoom. My daily task is to keep my own spirits up, and to face the seemingly-interminable pandemic, and uncertainty about the future, with courage. It's not easy for me, and takes conscious intention. Today before I got up I thought quite a bit about gratitude. Later I baked a complicated cake, made some five-pointed origami stars, wrote letters, took a long vigorous walk in the park, and still, I felt the presence of discouragement and anxiety in the background. The predictability of the solstice is ancient and steady, though -- and I took comfort in that.

Hermit Diary 36: Out of the City

For someone who loves the countryside and nature as much as I do, staying in the city this summer has been a real stretch. Usually we would go to the U.S. to visit my father and spend time at the lake, but the border is closed to non-essential travel, and even if we did it, such a trip would mean a month of strict quarantine - two weeks on either side. Staying in hotels or B&Bs seems risky, so overnights away haven't really been considered. I've never been so grateful to live near a large city park, or to have a fairly private terrace that I could fill with plants.

For several weeks, we've been working very hard to clean our studio of everything we're not going to need. This has meant sorting through possessions, tools, supplies, equipment, and the work of our whole professional and creative lifetimes. It's a huge, heavy, and sometimes emotional task that felt almost overwhelming at the beginning, but after steadily putting in several hours a day, day after day, we're getting there. We've sold or given away a lot, recycled or thrown out the rest, and are gradually getting down to the core of what we want and need to keep for the next period of our lives. As you can perhaps imagine, doing this in the middle of a pandemic, very hot weather, and the current worldwide political and social crises has contributed to a roller-coaster of moods, from frustration to encouragement, that we've managed with as much equanimity as we could. However, we've really needed some breaks, and those are coming now in the form of day trips out of the city.

One beautiful day this past week, we decided to drive south toward Vermont and visit a favorite farm that used to be a perennial stop when we were making that trip every fortnight. Earlier in August, we had driven to our favorite fromagerie, Fritz Kaiser, where we bought cheese made from the milk of his herd of Brown Swiss, goats, and something new: water buffalo, which was delicious. Then we swung back to this same farm to buy the first sweet corn of the season.

We love seeing the flat fields of southern Quebec, filled with hay and corn and soybeans; the blowsy summer clouds; the blue skies.

At the farm this time we bought corn, strawberries, and field tomatoes, and then sat at a picnic table beside the barn, eating local ice cream from little paper cups that came with a wooden stick -- when was the last time I'd had one of those?

Then we went into the barn to find the source of the deafening crowing that had punctuated our snack. It was this magnificent Plymouth Rock rooster, who continued to crow while we visited the ducks and geese and chickens...

the rabbits...

...and the sheep and the goats. Watch the video and at the end, you'll hear him too!

 

Hermit Diary 33: 50 Years of Ministry

 

On Monday I did this interview with Michael Pitts, former Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal, author of the newest book at Phoenicia Publishing, and a good friend. The next two days were spent on editing, resulting in the video shown above. Michael is a very progressive thinker and theologian who has written a lot about the issues facing the world and the Church -- and he's not someone who's afraid of change. I hope some of you will watch this, even if you're not a religious person, since we talk about issues of justice, the pandemic, doubt and uncertainty, and how mystery and science need to co-exist, not negate each other.

Here's a preview, in case you want a taste of the longer version:

 

I have to say that I love doing this kind of work, and that learning more about the technical side of video editing has been a pleasure, not a chore. My mind is racing with ideas of how to use live online events and recorded video for effective and creative communication: it's one positive and exciting outcome of our present situation.

 

 

Hermit Diary 30: Spiritual Inheritance

This entry is cross-posted from the Daily Bread blog at Christ Church Cathedral, for which it was written.

 

Psalm 92

The righteous will flourish like a palm tree,
    they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;
planted in the house of the Lord,
    they will flourish in the courts of our God.
They will still bear fruit in old age,
    they will stay fresh and green,
proclaiming, “The Lord is upright;
    he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him.”

 

Today, June 19, is my maternal grandmother’s birthday. Born in 1900, she would be an impossible 120 years old today, but actually she did live a very long life, to the age of 92, “still bearing fruit in old age.” If I have an “Anglican” forebear, who somehow gave me my faith and also a willingness to be involved with, and work for, the Church, it was my grandmother.

I grew up my grandparents’ big Victorian house in a sleepy town in rural central New York. They lived downstairs, and my parents and I lived upstairs, but it was essentially one home so far as I was concerned, extending outdoors onto the porches and into my grandmother’s gardens. We lived across from the Episcopal rectory, and the church was next to it, across a street, so in addition to being parishioners, we were neighbors and friends with the priests and their families, who were also in and out of our house all the time. Behind the white-clapboarded, New-England style church was an extensive, centuries-old cemetery where my mother taught me to read the inscriptions on the tombstones, before I ever started school.

My father came from a musical Methodist family; my paternal grandfather was a Methodist minister and my grandmother a devout, white-gloved, conservative minister’s wife who never touched alcohol or played cards but loved music and dramatic reading. My tenor-voiced, irrepressible father had been the wild black sheep of that family of four children, and though I inherited the musical gift, their rigid spirituality didn’t have much appeal.

My maternal grandparents, by contrast, were liberal, worldly, expansive people. I guess you could call them “pillars” of the church: staunch supporters and consistent attendees. My grandfather was a frequent member of the vestry, my grandmother was active in the Episcopal Church Women and the altar guild. I grew up singing in the choir and my family always went to church, but I dropped out of Sunday School after a year; I was constantly questioning what was being said and taught, and having a smart but agnostic mother probably didn’t help.

But somehow, my grandmother’s steady faith became an example. She was outspoken and opinionated; a feminist; a longtime teacher; an avid reader; skilled cook, gardener, and seamstress; and a matriarch who ruled the family from her armchair, knitting basket and New York Times Sunday paper at her side (she did the crossword each week in ink). But also tucked away next to that armchair was her 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and a copy of Forward Day by Day, which she followed and prayed from daily, though I never saw her doing it. Her faith was a private matter, and I don’t remember discussing it with her very much, but even as a little girl, I sensed that it was what guided and steadied her strong ship. I spent many years away from the church, but I never completely stopped believing. I always felt that something from my grandmother had taken hold of me and was stored away inside; when I came back, it was clear to me that it was not only her faith, but her broad, inclusive Anglicanism with its love of language, ritual, and music.

After my grandmother died, my mother approached me one day with something in her hand. “I thought maybe you should have this,” she said, handing me my grandmother’s well-worn prayer book. She was right; of the various things I inherited from her, that little book is the most precious. Inside the cover are three simple prayers written in my grandmother’s Palmer-method handwriting: two for preparation for worship, and one for after: “Grant O Lord that the lessons I have learned may take root in my heart, that I may remain faithful to the confession of my faith, and that I may put my faith to practice in my daily life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And I just noticed today that she had left the frayed black ribbon for marking pages at Psalm 139, my own favorite: “O Lord, thou has searched me out and known me,” which contains perhaps the most beautiful expression of God’s constant presence in all of Scripture. In the most difficult moments of my own life, I’ve often thought of my grandmother, and gratefully felt her strength and steadying presence -- which is, of course, simply feeling God through her.

This pandemic has made us all more aware of age, and the aged among us. It has made older people feel more vulnerable and isolated, and, to some extent, expendable; it has brought the pain of separation from loved ones and the fear and reality of dying alone. Western society is particularly good at discarding rather than respecting its elders and seeing them as a source of strength and wisdom. Navigating life’s challenges from a spiritual perspective really does boil down to “forward day by day”, as trite as it sounds; those who have done it have a great deal to teach us.

I love the image in today’s psalm of the human being flourishing like a palm tree, or a cedar of Lebanon, still bearing fruit in old age and staying fresh and green. So, on the positive side, perhaps this crisis could cause us to consider the ways in which we segregate by age, and how we could do more to encourage spiritual mentorship and friendship, as well as youthful companionship, within our own congregation.

 

 

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.