Day Two - Sorrow and Hope

We are on our second day of social distancing, following the recommendations of our local government (like most of the people in our province, thank goodness).  Yesterday went much like it usually does.  To be honest, not much will change in our day to day, except that we can't see any of our friends or family.  As we homeschool, that remains the same. Our oldest two, who were homeschooled right up until two years ago, easily reverted to the old routine of working alongside their siblings (and only put up a minor fuss when, apparently talking to some classmates through the day, they discovered that not every student had to keep up with school work this week!  Sorry boys, that's what happens when you're the child of a homeschooler 😉). Today however, is when things began to sink in.


An email from the CL community in Washington contained quotes from a community Mass with the responsible, Fr. Jose Medina, that challenged the way I have been approaching this situation and the accommodations it requires of me. Until now, my main priority has been to keep everything as normal as I can, and yesterday felt very much this way. As the sun went down last night I thought that maybe I could do this for a prolonged period without too much difficulty.  And then, from this email I read the following:

One of the ways, Fr. Jose observed, in which we can avert our gaze from the reality facing us is to immediately jump in to a battle to keep everything as normal as possible. In this way we engage in frantic activity and we do not pay attention to the fact that faces us.  We never give ourselves the chance to discover how the presence of Christ, about which we talk so much, can actually sustain our hope in the circumstances of our life which in this moment are quite dramatic.  We need to give ourselves time!  We need silence and prayer.  Fr. Jose spoke of the "Monastic structure of our lives."  We need to live the very concrete implication of this crisis: to be at home, with our families, living out that hypothesis of hope with which the movement has attracted our lives to Christ. Fr Jose stated, at Community Mass, "we can survive this time or have a profound experience of companionship and belonging.  The difference is incredible: the house as a mere container, or as a generative space." The proposal we would like to make at this time is to live this dimension of the crisis actively, attentive to the experience that living this well will generate in us.

I find that for the last week or so, things can change dramatically from the time I wake up in the morning, until the time I go to bed.  I wake up thinking one thing, we'll still do this event, we'll still be able to see these people, we'll scale back. And then as the day unfolds, new information develops, and what I thought would be possible is no longer so.  I don't check Facebook through the day, which in these days has been a blessing, but it can also cause me to be a bit distanced from how quickly things are happening.  The first clue to this disconnect for me was watching my husband come in the door from work.  He was quiet, as he usually is, but with a certain heaviness. When we had a quiet moment much later in the evening, he shared with me that he was starting to feel stressed, and I realized that there is so much that I miss by just being home. Don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful for the security I have here. But it did remind me again of those words from Fr. Jose.  Things are not normal, and just going along as if they are does not help me to truly face them.

Today is when it hit me. I had taken our kids to noon Mass (the last Mass in our diocese for the foreseeable future, since as of today even weekday Masses have been cancelled). I dropped off supplies to some friends, grabbed drive-through lunch for the kids, and came home. I noticed the empty parking lots of shopping centers, the lower-than-normal amount of traffic on the highways and, to my delight, many people out walking.  In many ways, it was quite peaceful, very much a "look on the bright side" kind of day.  Until I came home, and set to work.

We had a family work party to clean up the house, and my designated room was the dining room.  On the wall of this room resides our master calendar, that details all the comings and goings of the week. At the beginning of each week I update it with the new items that might happen to fall into our rotation, but there are many things that are standard every week, and just stay on the calendar. Erasing the things we were no longer able to do (the extras) wasn't difficult, it was almost a relief.  But when I looked at those permanent things, things like violin lessons, band, piano - that's when it really hit me.  I started to erase the first one, and I cried. The calendar would be empty if I took them all off, so I put it back, and left the rest there too. At least for the time being, I told myself. We may still get back to school before the year is out, and then we'll have to add them back anyway.  May as well wait and see.

It seemed such a strange thing to have hit me so profoundly, but it did.  Not so much the particular events, but I think it was just the prospect of an empty calendar that I could not fill.  It really drove home the seriousness of this moment. When it happened, the house was bustling with productivity. Each of the kids was hard at work cleaning, music was playing in the background, and unbeknownst to the kids, I was off in the corner just having a moment.  It was a moment I needed.

Because I realized that what Fr. Medina said is true. In order to live a true hope, we have to have some sense of the sorrow of the moment, to know what it is we hope for. It is not usual for the whole world to be shut into their homes.  But these can either just be a space to "keep on keeping on," or they can be somewhere that causes us to pause, and to really grow close to Jesus through what He is doing in this time.

I recalled when I first started running, and just how much it hurt those first few months every single time I got back from a run.  It was like my lungs were going to leap out of my chest, I felt every inch of that workout and it was hard. But over and over again, I would say to my husband, "I feel so alive!"  I began to go out in search of that discomfort, because I knew what would come after was a feeling so amazing, that I wanted to keep having it.  This pain that showed me the path to something I had long neglected and for which I longed; it became something I went in search of. And to me, this small moment of sorrow at seeing and really feeling what we are loosing in these days, very much felt the same. In that paradoxical moment of happy oblivious children, busily working about to cheery music and my house getting clean (what a beautiful moment for me!), and me unseen to them, sobbing, and feeling the weight of what lay before us, somehow made me feel alive. And even more than that, it made me hope. It made me see what I am longing for, which is a closeness to Jesus that I didn't even realize I was missing, just on the horizon, just past this suffering (and indeed, through it). It gave me the hope that I didn't even know I was missing, a hope that could only have come through sorrow.  The two are companions.

I have no idea what the next weeks will continue to bring, but I know I have never felt so connected to humanity in all of my life.  This sacred moment begs all of us to look to one another and to band together in a grand act of charity in the hopes that we will be able to help even one person.  Through our privileged participation in this community, we are being given opportunities that are tremendous for ourselves as well. I pray that as these days continue, we will be open to what God is doing through them, and resist the temptation to keep everything normal.

"We will, then, later consider together how to make the path we walk in the weeks awaiting us into a treasure for us all, and the most suitable way to respond to any questions that emerge. With openness to the unexpected."  (Fr. Julian Carron)