Day 366

Four sweaters, five shawls, thirteen or fourteen Fair Isle hats, plus two pairs of socks. Those are the knitting projects I’ve completed in year one of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some were knit from stash, meaning yarn bought years ago, on sale, on impulse, on vacation: merino and alpaca in a heathery purple, deep green laceweight Malabrigo, a gray to deep fuchsia gradation. Sweater yarn came in the mail, purchased online at yarn.com. Fair isle hats came in kits from Sievers on Washington Island, to go with the Katie's Kep pattern from the Shetland Islands in Scotland. 

There’s a surprising harmony to the colors when I pile everything together in the sunlight in the living room chair,  brighter and warmer than I remember -- or is that just today's late-winter sunshine? 

Day 366. Your mileage may vary on the number, depending on what day last March you count from. For me it's Friday, March 13, when I wrapped up my office computer in my fleece jacket and carried it to the car. The night before I'd had dinner with my daughter, my son and his friend -- my last meal in a (nearly empty) restaurant. 

Life wound down, flattened down. 

That covid curve we flattened last spring, peaked again and again, while day-to-day life seemed flat and colorless. Flat as a computer screen, dull as dinners of the same four or five home-cooked menus made week after week. (I live with a very picky eater.) 

Flat also because of not wanting to cry. Or not believing in joy. Just trying to get through until dinnertime, bedtime, morning. 

Day 366, ten days past my second shot. I went out to do some Saturday errands this morning -- the hold shelf at the library, the drive-up window at the bank, curbside pick-up for food. It's a beautiful day, the kind of Saturday that a year ago would have found me poking through thrift stores or buying stuff I had no idea I even needed at Marshall's or Home Goods. The past year has taken the edge off shopping. A year of looking at all the stuff already in my house has left me pretty sure I don't need more. I drove on home.

And then my daughter and I went out for a bike ride this afternoon, which means she rides her adult trike, "the best birthday present ever" from last December, while I walk in front, in back, or alongside on the grass. We were headed north down one of the streets in our neighborhood when we heard and then saw the Fitzgerald's Community Truck Concert stopped on the other side of the street a few houses in front of us. We listened to "Wild Mountain Thyme" and two more songs, with a live singer and guitar. Neighbors gathered, bike-riders got off their bikes and sat on the curb, people came out of their houses. Grown-ups, children, listening, grateful, socially distanced. 

A live landscape that was not flat at all.

Razzle-dazzle 'em

I mark the anniversary of The Perverse Lutheran on or around Transfiguration Sunday every year, rather than on the specific date of the first post in 2006. So we'll call today, Transfiguration 2021, the 15th anniversary of my blog, even though it's two weeks before the actual date. 

I read that first post a few minutes ago and did not find it embarrassing, which is my standard for judging my writing from the past. I'm not sure if it's a low standard, or a high one. Did I step around cliches? Do I sound honest? Not too eager to please? Not too desperate for attention? Is there a little bit of originality in there, even if it's just a smidge? 

That first post -- on banishing the alleluia during Lent -- is not too bad. I'm not cringing here in 2021. In fact the post ends up with a rhetorical question that works ieven better in 2021, especially if you substitute "the pandemic" for "Lent":

How could we go through Lent if we didn’t know that we can still get that alleluia out when we need it? 

It's crazy cold here in Chicago and the snow and winter weather advisories just keep coming. Leaving a warm bed in the morning for another day of the same old going nowhere feels heavy, hard, and never-ending. In my view Ash Wednesday should carry a whiff of spring or come in the middle of a muddy February thaw. Not this year. I have a new understanding of C. S. Lewis's Narnia, where it's always winter but never Christmas.

Today in Sunday School I told the story of Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop, with Luke open in my lap but with frequent interjections and questions. Why would you go up a mountain to pray? Who are Moses and Elijah? What does "dazzling" make you think of? 

And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. (Luke 9:29)

Shiny, said one girl, Bright, said another child. Good answers, I said, but privately I was thinking, gosh, dazzling is not a very heavenly word. A honky-tonk beat from the musical "Chicago" played in the back of my mind: "Give 'em the old razzle-dazzle, razzle-dazzle 'em." The song doesn't make your toes tap so much as it makes your shoulders shimmy and your feet snake along the stage, maybe with a little wink at the audience. Because in this context razzle-dazzle is what you do when you've got some skill but maybe haven't got a lot of substance to work with. 

Dazzling -- it's a word for something that leaves people wide-eyed, gaping, wordless. Dazzling displays of derring-do. Dazzling lights of Broadway. Dazzling displays of bravado or speechifying or driving to the basket in an NBA championship. 

"His clothes became dazzling white." So often for us, Jesus in paintings and illustrations is already dressed in white, pristine white for holiness. It also makes him stand out in the crowd. Maybe for James, John and Peter "dazzling white" was totally outside their experience, so that when they told the story later they chose an unusual word that now gets translated with the zip and electricity of "dazzle." Jesus and his band of disciples would have been dusty and dirty most of the time, didn't often get their clothes washed. A poor carpenter's grimy garments transformed into dazzling white was a whole new reality, way beyond an illustrator's convention. Dazzling. They saw his glory.

And later, they saw his suffering. There, too, on the cross, it was God's beloved, dazzling son. 

Here's our Sunday School project from today, Jesus' hands raised in blessing. (Thank you, Mrs. Modrich, for the photo.)

At the end of my words

What other writing prompt would a person need besides a pale blue sky, six minutes before sunrise on a January morning? Icicles on the gutter outside the window are bumpy, knobby from freeze and thaw. Thin clouds over the houses on the east side of the street brighten slowly, warm white at their centers, with lavender edges. Scan the lacy black trees and you see clumpy old nests holding memories of last summer, waiting, maybe, for inhabitants' return.

I've been awake since shortly after five. Read the New York Times in my bed cave, under flannel sheets and warm comforter. I flipped through this: an art lesson on collage, cubism and the early 20th century, presented online, mobile-friendly, as an immersive experience. Close-ups to draw your attention to this and that in the image under study. And pulling back into the world around and beyond the object to talk about information overload in Paris pre-World War I.

Oh, art. 

People explaining paintings can capture my attention, but only to the point where they don't explain too much. Tell me what the artist is doing. Where's the break with reality? Where's the window into more reality? Don't try to tie it all up in a box with Meaning printed on the wrapping paper.

Because there are too many words in the world right now. Maybe that's because, confined to our homes, we experience one another through screens. Through recordings and Zooms and national media, Facebook posts, tweets, verbal battles in virtual worlds, crafted selves (like this one, in this blog). Words fail us when we look for something more real. Or at least they're failing me. 

What nonsense she's writing this morning! 

The nitty-gritty of life in an America pandemic, circa 2021: the dreary hunt for vaccination appointments, which requires keeping track of passwords for this or that app, this or that website. Words in headlines tempting you to click, to read repetitively about the tiny advances made over yesterday's mess. Words in thought pieces trying to make sense of the same things I'm trying to make sense of. Words that make a shell that few words, if any, can pierce. 

Blue sky, clear today, snow tomorrow. There's a crazy patch of light on a pile of snow across the street. Crazy -- I looked to see what strange spotlight or headlight could make that glow at that angle. I don't understand it, but it must be, somehow, the sun, which I can't quite see yet. Forty minutes past sunrise it's still hidden behind the houses on the east side of the street. But it's there, making that crazy patch of light, moving now across the sidewalk to the street. 

With the sky, it's enough. I'll use no words to wrap it up, no words to hold it in.

Repair

I watched the live feed of the inauguration on Wednesday on my laptop and the nighttime inaugural festivities on TV. Calm crept over me, an unfamiliar feeling. There was nothing to be incensed over, no horrifying selfish incompetence. But a last quick scroll through Facebook at the end of the evening showed a post from a distant acquaintance expressing concern over what the change in administrations in Washington would mean. The comments below echoed and amplified the fear.

Deeply crazy, I thought -- a phrase which was not so much about degrees of crazy but about degrees of deep. How could anyone fear the election of 78-year-old Joe Biden, a flawed (as we all are) but decent man, a man of humility and faith? Someone focused on returning competence to our federal government. 

But there it was. 

I've tried to imagine my way into that fear. Was it fear of "crazy socialists" and the associated atheism? Fear of a world with too many choices? Fear that the sure foundations of your faith might shift and slip sideways in a pluralistic culture? 

We label others as racist, phobic, selfish, godless, but very few of us think of ourselves as deeply crazy or  prejudiced or amoral. Things are what they are and naming them privately and publicly is the first step to fixing them. But you can't just dismiss what a person's emotions, actions and judgments mean to them. 

So I'm back to imagining the inside of someone else's head. What I see is fear of a terrifically complicated uncertain world. One where logic says giving something to one group of people means taking it away from another group. Where gender, morality, Christian doctrine are immutable. Where seeing things as relative or shifting undermines everything. Where truth has to be -- what? a certainty through the ages.

My very insistence on the existence of multiple worldviews is a belief in itself. My acceptance of different views of morality, even the possibility of different views on the faith and ethics of Jesus, identifies me as one sort of Christian (or hardly a Christian to some people). 

I believe that the kingdom of God — the coming kingdom, the kingdom coming into being, the kingdom potentially present in each moment of our lives infused with God's breath and Spirit — is bigger than any one of us can know. That it is all the things in Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem. And that this vision is very much a gift of the Black church.

We've had three Wednesdays in January: insurrection, impeachment, inauguration in succession. We're working toward a new world, at least I hope so. The repair work begins. It will be slow and hard. 

And I pray it brings us together.

Back in time

 I've been working from home since mid-March. I brought my work computer home to the big corner desk in the back room that has served as my work space since we bought this house 35 years ago. 

It was a last-minute decision on that last day before the church building closed and all of us -- school students, teachers, staff -- retreated to homes and screens and Zoom. It was drizzling, so I pulled my car up to the church door and wrapped the iMac in my fleece jacket before carrying it out the door and laying it on the back seat. 

At home it took the place of an older Mac, one whose operating system had been regularly updated, most recently past the point where it could handle all it was being asked to do with practical speed. And I settled into the work-at-home space where I had spent many, many late-night hours a couple decades ago,  dog sleeping under the desk, humans asleep in bedrooms nearby.

I shopped for that desk, a big one designed for a corner, for months, and brought it home and assembled it all by myself. It's veneer on particleboard with a wide and very sturdy keyboard shelf. The box must have been a heavy lift up the back steps. 

The desk faces into a corner with windows to the right and book shelves on the wall above. The chair came from a garage sale  -- a heavy office chair with shiny squared-off metal arms and a brown seat. After a couple tries I got the height just where I wanted it and added a flat pillow (also from a garage sale) that shortens up the seat. The chair is worn and lumpy and mine. I sprawl this way and that across it at least as much as I sit up the way you're supposed to.

All this is nothing but a lead up to writing about going back into my office at church the other day (Wednesday, to be exact, the day the mob invaded the Capitol).  It's always strange to be there, like walking into a museum exhibit of my past, frozen in time. Last spring's choir music is still in a folder on my desk. The bulletin board holds bits and pieces of life through last winter -- but nothing newer. There's still a box of odds and ends that I'm not sure what to do with and another odd collection of clippings and things I mean to bring home. 

Back at my house, in the morning sun, I can see dust -- on the floor under the dining room table, on the piano, on the lower shelf of the old washstand that serves as an end table. There's a Miss Fabersham quality to parts of the house -- things that have stayed frozen in time since last March -- just as there is to my office at church. 

Waiting for a new era. 

Hope and glory

I woke up early on this day when the days begin to grow longer, and sat for a while in the glow of the Christmas tree lights as the sky brightened in the window behind me. Daytime will be just a little bit longer today, one day after the winter solstice. For now, at 7:15am on December 22, 2020, I'll let that be a sign for me of growing hope for a better world in 2021. Or, more realistically, of the presence of hope and grace even in sad and painful times. 

Easier said than done. Hope and grace are more easily felt in the early morning quiet than in the late afternoon, when the sun goes down too soon after too many hours of screens and stress and clamor. Of  trying to construct or reconstruct real human voices behind the black and white paragraphs of news or the endless strings of emails. 

I have felt at times like I am holding my breath through this pandemic. Or letting go and then quickly holding it again. Tears creep into my eyes and throat too easily these days, often cued by singing or memories of singing or trying to sing. I have been in church every Christmas of my entire life (with the possible exception of the year I was in first grade and didn't get to say my "piece" in the Christmas Eve service because I was sick). Christmas at home, without the familiar rituals of church-going, choir-singing, and family gatherings afterward will be tough. And Christmas without music-making -- dear God! When it comes to music, it's the making of it that matters most to me. 

I have spent very little time making music during this pandemic, but I am making hats. I think it's an even dozen, or will be when I finish the one I cast onto my knitting needles last night. I've also knit two sweaters, finished a third one, knit a couple pairs of socks and two lace shawls. There is no sound in knitting, but there is rhythm and sensation in the hands. The product does not float on air and then disappear. It lasts. I don't find tears welling up in my throat when I pick up my knitting. I find comfort there instead, and breath.

Oh, this post, more labored over than a reader could know. What meaning can be found in breath-holding, music-making, post-solstice sunrises, yarn and hope and grace? And why even try? These are dark days, even under a brightening winter sky. I've prayed this morning for peace for the dying.And prayed for grit and determination for the rest of us.

“Glory to God in the highest heaven," sang the angels, "and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” They lit up the night sky, those angels. Had the shepherds ceased to be "sore afraid" by then? Did their fear dissolve into wonder? Did the light in the sky illuminate their hearts, as the rising sun is now showing me the inner branches at the top of my Christmas tree? Did they find hope and grace in the morning light of the manger?

"Marshfield Christmas Dawn II" by docmartini is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Perfect rejoicing

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." That's St. Paul, of course, writing to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 4) from prison. 

I can't hear that text and the verses that follow it without also hearing this 16th century English motet. It begins with an upward leap of a perfect fourth on the word "rejoice." 

Why a "perfect" fourth? It may be one of those things we were just told to accept in music theory class. There are major and minor seconds, thirds, sixth and sevenths, but fourths and fifths -- they may be augmented or diminished, but they are never major or minor. They're perfect, and one is the inversion of the other: C to F is a fourth, F to the C above is a fifth. And C to C, of course, is an octave (despite four and five adding up to nine, but that has something to do with counting the F twice. Which reminds me of certain math errors I've made while knitting in the round, or spacing buttonholes. Or something.) The fifth above is the second overtone, so there's another layer of math here, and then there's the thing where you're going from the dominant back home to the tonic. It's the "Here Comes the Bride" interval. It holds a certain majesty. 

(If you'd like to cite contrary examples in music, if a perfect fourth has an entirely different character for you, or you say it functions differently in some dissonant or atonal music of the early or late 20th century, well, that's your problem. Your sorry little problem. Excuse me.)

A few years ago, a visiting English choral clinician, Tim Brown, formerly of Clare College, Cambridge,  told our St. Matthew Passion rehearsal at my church that a singer could never sing a perfect fourth high enough. You had to aim high to get it exactly right -- to make it perfect in sound as well as in theory. That little piece of advice, offered as an aside to whatever it was he was trying to get us to do with the Bach, has stuck with me, so that when I see one of those things coming (or used to see one, when we could still sing in choirs) I aim high. Maybe with my eyebrows lifted, maybe -- and more to the point -- by making plenty of space to hold the sound, plenty of room for it to resonate brightly in exactly the perfect place. 

It makes perfect sense to me that a composer would set the word rejoice as a perfect, upward-moving fourth. It's a call, a sit up and pay attention gesture. It lifts spirits to say, to sing, "rejoice!"

Are there other instances of hymns and sacred songs rejoicing on a perfect fourth? In Advent hymnody there's "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers." Tomorrow in our mid-week worship services we'll sing the Advent hymn "Awake, Awake and Greet the New Morn," with a dancing fourth on both "awakes." Other examples?  It's 9:30 at night and the hymnal's at the other end of the house. 

Paul rejoiced from prison and exhorted his readers to virtues beyond rejoicing, or perhaps rooted in rejoicing: gentleness and/or moderation (depending on translation); don't worry; pray and give thanks. Trust that the Lord is, in 16th century lingo,  "e'en at hand." 

And now I've thought of another hymn that begins with an upward leap of a perfect fourth: "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," which I think is one of the most beautiful tunes ever. 

Somewhere in time and space, Christ on the cross met Paul in prison, and Paul rejoiced. Christ meets us too, from that cross. Perfect rejoicing.