A Touch of Covid Immobilizes

It’s my turn to have a covid infection.  I developed a cough on the eve of an appointment to get the bivalent vaccine.  Just a little cough.  So I took a home test and was surprised when it showed a faint positive line.  No bivalent vaccine for me.

So, the immobility.  I retreated to the guest bedroom Wednesday, where I’ve been since, except for venturing briefly (in a mask) to other rooms for necessities.  No TV.  If I stay here for five days, the minimum period of self-isolation that the CDC recommends to anyone who tests positive or has covid symptoms, it will represent an immobility utterly new to me.  Never have I been confined to one room for days at a time.

The utter absence of bedside companionship makes it strange.  No one to come in with chicken broth or sit in the corner to pass the time.  My going out to lie on the sofa in the living room is out of the question, too.  If I had an ordinary flu or cold, such would be my choice for seeing it through.

The isolation covid requires is elaborate and severe.  It’s no wonder that household infection rates are so high (50% or more).  Most families lack the room that the authorities say a self-isolating covid patient requires.  Not every household has a bed and bathroom to devote to self-isolation. Also, the goal of keeping the covid patient isolated from others at meals is attainable only if eating schedules can be staggered or someone else can wait on the covid patient in his or her room.  This is impossible if a household is cramped or its members have other obligations.

No wonder many Americans dismiss or ignore the official guidelines.  For thousands, these guidelines are impracticable, outlandishly so.  Space considerations aside, many workers can ill afford to stay home for so many days; those without sick leave forfeit their pay.

Global forces have found their way into my guest room via my lungs.  Large events, such as covid, the January 6th insurrection, and the war in Ukraine, define our times historically.  These vast, complex dramas, which are too large for any ordinary person to influence or control, have powerfully and lastingly transformed the tenor of our milieu.  Yet, even as covid sweeps over society and every one of us individually, its effects on us are isolating.  Just as covid’s dangers have jeopardized the institutions and customs that define society, so masking divorces us from one another.  Being sick with covid not only removes us from society; it disrupts our households and families.  Official policies regarding covid estrange people from one another and challenge individuals to live according to scientific standards at the expense of their own time-honored ways.

The nation’s response to covid is not necessarily objectionable.  It can be defended on humanitarian grounds.  At the same time, I get why segments of the population view the fight against covid as quixotic and ineffectual.  Even as I adhere to prevailing guidance (which I need my doctor to interpret for me), I’m aware of its byzantine, hieratic qualities, which make compliance a kind of luxury.

It’s Lent

Independence Pass, Colorado

It’s Ash Wednesday, March 6, and Lent is beginning. The Christian season of Lent has many meanings, but essentially it is a season of preparation, observed during the forty days leading up to Easter. Over the centuries, many Christians have chosen to make this a season of self-denial, mortifying their flesh in imitation of Christ, who, according to the Gospel, spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness just prior to his crucifixion.   Scroll to the bottom or click here to listen to the audio version of this post.

Although Christ did withdraw for a period of fasting and prayer, during which time he was tempted in the wilderness by a “deceiver” whose temptations he resisted, the larger purpose of Jesus’s spiritual retreat was to understand his mission on earth: how he should live the remainder of his days, what he had been put here to do.  In this sense, Lent is a season of spiritual renewal, or, as our dean has informed us in this week’s newsletter, ”Lent is Easter in disguise.” It’s a time to be revived, renewed, and rejuvenated. At least, I am approaching Lent as a season of renewal this year.

Specifically, I’m going to be reading a devotional booklet put out by an Episcopal organization called The Living Compass. The booklet is called Living Well through Lent 2019, and its overarching theme is Practicing Forgiveness With All Your Heart, Soul, Strength, and Mind. Although I’m using the booklet in printed form, it’s also available as a free downloadable PDF.  Or, you can sign up to receive the content of the booklet via email daily.  There is a Spanish-language version, too.  For more information about Living Well Through Lent 2019, go to the website, livingcompass.org.

The opening reflection for Ash Wednesday, written by the Right Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, introduces the topic of “extreme” or “radical” forgiveness. At the outset, she describes extreme forgiveness as a divine attribute. It is in the character of God to have mercy and to forgive every category of human sin. She then describes the case of Ms. Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who was subjected to Dr. Mengele’s eugenic testing. Late in life, Ms. Kor, who emigrated to the US, has chosen extreme forgiveness as a way to transcend the weight of all that she, and millions of others, suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Reverend Burrows writes,

Lent is our time to be intentional about taking stock of the most broken parts of our lives and our world as we seek forgiveness for our sins of omission and commission. It may be too much to imagine writing a letter of forgiveness to someone who has caused us pain or done violence to us. It might be beyond our fathoming to recount the pain, let alone forgive. It may seem too extreme. And yet . . . Jesus, who had an enviable well of forgiveness to draw upon even as he hung from the cross, continually calls us to the Way of Love and new depths of grace, mercy, and liberation. There are many paths to liberation, and extreme forgiveness is but one. However we get there, may this Lenten journey lead to the healing of ourselves and our world that allows resurrection, not evil, to be our defining story.

For each day of Lent, the booklet offers a brief written meditation on a different aspect of forgiveness as a concept and a process, and how the work of forgiveness can engage our minds, hearts, souls, and bodies. The reader is then invited to write a response to each day’s reading. Here is my response to Reverend Burrows.

To be honest, I worry that thinking too much about forgiveness will destabilize me. It is a complex topic, embracing as it does sins of commission and omission (i.e., “things done and left undone”), as well as social wrongs for which we might bear complicity. Meditating on this topic involves dwelling on recent and perhaps slight hurts, as well as those that are more grave and may have occurred long ago. In addition, “practicing forgiveness” is an entirely different process, at first glance, than seeking forgiveness—the former involves giving pardon to someone who may have wronged me, while the latter involves being pardoned for something regrettable or damaging that I have done. The process of forgiving seems to involve almost godlike strength, but for that very reason promises to draw us into a new relationship with one another and with God. 

Many of my sins are those of omission, for I have often been indecisive, immobilized by doubt and fear: in a word, cowardly. I often wake up feeling awful about something decent that I just don’t have the nerve to do, or do yet.

 Finally, in thinking of forgiveness and those who have hurt me, I am struck by how few of those people have ever taken the initiative to acknowledge their injurious acts and how they wounded my feelings or inflicted tangible and lasting harm. But in the “practicing forgiveness” model, that doesn’t matter, because putting my finger on those hurts and proactively pardoning the people who inflicted them is all on me. When someone hurts me and doesn’t admit that or apologize, that leaves me feeling very small. So I get why Ms. Kor found that offering radical pardon to a Nazi perpetrator left her freer and lighter afterward.

Image: Independence Pass by Susan Barsy

The Thinking Cap

Toward El Morro, © 2017 Susan Barsy

My father’s death a month ago overshadowed the calendar: overshadowed politics, Christmas, the work on my desk.  Though long-expected, his dying was startling and awe-inspiring, as awful and absorbing as seeing a ship sink or a comet flicker out.  Will the final disappearance of someone so constant and strong bring on other mysterious changes, too?

Writing about it feels strange: words, like shovels, make his demise and burial more definite, undeniable.  Besides, when I write, I put on my ‘thinking cap,’ which amounts to a return to habit, the resumption of a normal routine.  I doubt my father would have it any other way.  The deaths of his parents were followed by silence, their funerals unadorned with eulogies, the family sitting together at home after a noisy funeral luncheon, each mourner quietly nursing a whiskey.  The next day it was back to work, with nary a tear or outward trace of loss.

This much tribute, though, must be paid: without my father I would not have the intellect I have today.  Not only was he the model of a thoughtful and curious being, but he encouraged these attributes in his children and respected our gifts.  He was happy to have daughters with musical or mathematical abilities, who had political opinions, or were good at problem-solving.  Not surprisingly in high school I was a math nerd, a National Merit Scholar along with 5 boys and my friend Wendy.  In college, when my literary interests flourished, I found gifts like Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature and Edmund Wilson’s collected letters under the Christmas tree–reads that defined my earliest intellectual goals.

In a way that my formal education did not, my father stood for an active engagement with society.  He was someone who understood every physical feature of a landscape: its plants, institutions, machinery, and buildings.  Besides being a businessman and industrialist, he was a worshipper and a forward-looking inquirer.  He looked out.  He was interested in our futures, in the direction of society.  He traveled widely for work, bringing back gifts and stories; otherwise he remained in motion, always busy with projects that would bring new beauty or marvels home.  His view of us and of other people was profoundly egalitarian and mercifully free of social-science thinking.  Despite his practical, scientific bent, my father’s worldview left plenty of room for the ideal and the miraculous.

I’m fortunate to have had such a wonderful father.  He left me an heiress of sorts.  Some such is my song as I put my thinking cap on.

Image: ‘Toward El Morro,’
© 2017 Susan Barsy

Graces I Grew Up With

1.
God is great, God is good
And we thank him for his food.
By his hand must all be fed.
Give us, Lord, our daily bread.

2.
Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts,
Which we are about to receive of thy bounty,
Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

3.
Be present at our table, Lord;
Be here and everywhere adored;
These morsels bless, and grant that we
May feast in paradise with thee.  Amen.

4.
Bless, O Father, these gifts to our use
And us to thy service,
And keep us ever mindful of the needs of others,
Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

How these graces and not others came to be used in our household is a complete mystery.  Yet these are among the most durable prayers I know today.

The backward-looking person

photograph of a slice from our Christmas tree.
The backward-looking person is by definition some kind of historian: genealogist, stamp collector, spinner of yarns.

Likes: old movies, old pictures, old people, antiques, closets, old wine, old letters, long-unopened boxes, old houses, etiquette, graveyards, and some museums.

Remembers: what her best friend said in the upstairs bathroom in 1966, where long-demolished buildings used to stand, what was planted in the garden three seasons ago.

Occupational niches: therapist, humanist, detective, literary scholar, auctioneer, biographer, architect, cook, librarian, judge, tour guide, preservationist, priest, grammarian, lexicographer, hand-writing expert, estate lawyer.

Keeps: used calendars, concert programs, pianos that nobody plays, grandpa’s hats, old cameras, sample ballots.

Can imagine: being on a ship in 1803, being enslaved, being a Founding Father, being a fin-de-siecle beauty, being Teddy Roosevelt, cooking and eating in colonial times.

Can’t fathom: how much happens in a day.

Image: a ring from our 2013 Christmas tree.
Susan Barsy