I was struck the other day, as I was watching the coverage of the protests in response to the killing of George Floyd, by what one of the protesters said. He was a young man whose eyes seemed to grow suddenly ancient. A reporter had asked him what he was feeling. He paused for a moment. It seemed as though he were trying to grasp, gingerly, two contradictory emotions. “I feel sad,” he said. “And I feel hopeful.” The young man spoke well. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews seemed to express the kind of gritty faith that young man was clinging to: “Faith,” the letter writer said, “is the realization of what is hoped for, evidence of things not seen.” It is an aching hope that we cling to—we believers—in these days of pandemic and strife.
To maintain my sanity—that is, to keep my aching, hopeful heart strong—I do a few things. I pray and dine with my Holy Cross community every night (carefully, keeping our safe distance, washing our hands). Thank God for my Holy Cross confreres. These days I’ve gained a deeper and renewed appreciation for religious life in Holy Cross. Chock up one grace borne of this horrible virus. I’m thinking now of Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi and the lyric that goes, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” We sit, two to a table now, mixing it up throughout the week, so that, after a couple weeks we’ve each spent 45–50 minutes of one-on-one time with everyone else. I think we’ve become a more loving, patient, generous community. Take that Covid-19. This life we lead, it’s not gone at all. It’s being reborn.
I also go on my daily walks—maintaining, of course, sufficient social distancing from dogs and their walkers, joggers and runners, gardeners. (I occasionally pass a house with a UP lawn sign of one sort or another or one with a “This is Pilot Country” sign taped to their front window. When I do, I always raise a resolute fist and say, “Go Pilots!”) On one of those walks in mid-March, just as everything was shutting down, I ran into Spiderman, Elsa, and the Batman. Well, actually, they were three costumed children on three different streets who had emerged from their respective homes to play superhero in their front yards. Later, as I sat in my apartment deciding if I was going to grab another movie from my Netflix queue or read or pray or clean out my closet at last, it struck me that those children were like little prophets sent from God to remind me that I had nothing to be afraid of. In their capacious imaginations (these newly constructed creative factories are humming with energy!) they knew, with a little faith, we can, all of us, outflank our fears. We may be hunkered down in place, confined to square footage that has an incarcerating feel to it. We may be wondering why we didn’t buy stock in Purell and Charmin. We may be muttering, “So this is what Grandma must have been feeling during the Great Depression (anxious, worried, overwhelmed)." But then along comes someone who reminds us who we are and whose we are: We are God’s children. He loves us. And His love—which finds its greatest expression in compassion and mercy, banishes fear. So in the tiny acre of our solitude, we make space for our Abba who will arrive (often when we least expect) and nourish our weary souls. We may be social distancing from each other, but God, I am convinced, has never been closer.
I’m thinking now about a trip I took twenty years ago, with a group of students from Chicago. We went to Ireland for a service-learning experience. We spent a week on the Wexford coast with some tough Dublin teenagers—kids who rarely got to see the Irish Sea, the gentle current of the River Slaney, or the forests of the Wicklow Mountains. One of the Irish boys—I’ll call him Brendan—had a scar that ran down his left cheek. I found out early on that his father had cut him with a carpet cutter in a drunken rage a while back, so Brendan kept to himself mostly, rarely spoke, and never cried.
One of the Chicago boys who had taken the trip—I’ll call him Ryan—came because his mother told him he had to. A week before the trip, Ryan’s dad had been arrested and was sitting in a Cook County jail cell. His mother thought the trip would do Ryan good. And it did seem to. Occasionally I saw him wrestling happily with a few of the Irish boys, his mop of hair matted down in joyful sweat. He laughed heartily and matched the Irish boys cuss word for cuss word.
But then a few times I caught him when he thought no one was looking. Ryan’s smile deserted him, his eyes darkened, and twenty years seem to be added to his age. In that moment I saw Ryan as he perhaps saw himself: essentially fatherless, untethered, and sinking fast without knowing why. What will come of this boy? I thought.
One night toward the end of the trip, I went looking for Ryan because he was not with us as we huddled around a bonfire on the beach. I found him a few blocks away, sitting with Brendan at the end of a pier. Ryan’s right arm cupped Brendan, held him close. I could hear Brendan sobbing.
St. Augustine was purported to have said, “We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.” He is, of course, right, but I have to admit these days, I count it as evidence of the Holy Spirit working in me when I sing "Alleluia!" at Mass or prayer. I take a glimpse outside my Christie Hall window and onto a world reeling, frightened, frustrated. I see all these Brendans out there, suffering silently, alone, wondering if they’re going to make it. It still feels like Lent to me. Perhaps it will for a long while. But then I think of Ryan, who, on one lonely night, outflanked fear and reached lovingly across a great divide and found—and this I hope—that his life was not gone at all. And neither was Brendan’s. They were, on that pier, being reborn.
