Haiti, Yemen, Massachusetts

Last week's earthquake in Haiti seemed more apocalyptic than just about any natural disaster I have heard about, including the Christmas tsunami in 2004. Not that there's any settled place that's good for a strong earthquake to strike, but Haiti is probably one of the worst places to have been hit. A day or two after the quake David Brooks had a column in the New York Times in which he noted that when a 7.0 earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, 63 people died. The same magnitude earthquake may have caused 100,000 deaths in Haiti. I have heard on the news that one reason the devastation has been as bad as it is is that there was no enforcement of building codes due to a less-than-reliable government. (I am also told that the U.S. bears some responsibility for Haiti's political situation as well--but I don't know enough about that yet to comment.) Also, I learned there had been a trend of people leaving the countryside and coming to Port-au-Prince in an attempt to find work, so that the city had many more people in it than it could reasonably support. I heard a radio news story yesterday suggesting that since Haiti was so dysfunctional, the earthquake might be a good chance to restart, to rebuild the nation almost from scratch. So I guess my perception of the seriousness of the earthquake was pretty accurate. I felt more sadness and dismay about it than about any natural disaster before. It seemed disrespectful to want to listen to the "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" podcast at the end of the week for some laughs. Maybe this emotional reaction is a consequence of generally becoming a little more in touch with my emotions during this first unit of CPE.

Besides thinking a lot about Haiti recently, the Christmas underwear bomber has gotten people talking about Yemen. I remember reading about the instability of that country in the fall in the New York Times, before it started making most headlines. (I take pride in paying more attention to world news than many people--perhaps this is a consequence of knowing another prominent world language and having traveled to Europe and Latin America). I'm very much looking forward to listening to Jeb Sharp's podcast on the history of Yemen. Her podcast is one of the ones from "The World" that I follow regularly, and if you're interested in learning about various aspects of world history, I highly recommend it.

I'm glad I wasn't in Massachusetts to be in the middle of the campaigns and election for Ted Kennedy's vacant Senate seat. I know less about Scott Brown's positions than about Martha Coakley's, but neither candidate seemed particularly attractive to me, so I was glad I wasn't able to vote. And while I'm not particularly sympathetic to the Republicans' categorical opposition to the health care reform bill (about which I am still ambivalent myself, looking at it from a faith perspective), I also don't feel particularly sorry for the Democrats either. It seems like they may have taken their super-majority for granted, and so they could more or less do what they wanted with the health care bill with limited accountability. If they had had to be more accountable to the public and to the Republicans, perhaps there would have been less behind-the-scenes negotiation, fewer tricks like buying a senator's vote by giving Nebraska special treatment, and writing a bill that was way too long for anyone to really read closely. (Is the bill really 2000 pages long? That's what I've heard.) That's the risk of being at the top of power--having little to gain and a lot to lose. Now--shockingly!--the Democrats will have to work with Republicans to get any health care legislation passed at all, unless they give up on it or the Republicans show no interest in anything but stonewalling health care reform. I think the 2010 midterm elections will be very interesting.

books and a post-Christmas reflection

Some of the gifts I got at Christmas were books, as has probably been true for me for many Christmases now. They included the pope's most recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate and How the States Got their Shapes. The encyclical is fitting into my rotation of spiritual reading for night prayer. The latter book I read at some point during the last year of theology school when I was living in Brighton. It's the kind of book that I'll want to go back to again and again for information, like my book about all the flags of the world. I guess, in other words, that it's a reference book. It looks like I'm really building a library.

The last few mornings I've been reading Murder in the Cathedral over breakfast. Whenever possible, I like to commemorate the feast of St. Thomas Becket (December 29) by reading either Eliot's work or Jean Anouilh's play Becket, the basis of the movie of the same name starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. I haven't read any of T. S. Eliot for a long time. The volume of his poetry is the one I used in Fr. Coskren's honors studies in theology class during my first semester of college. That was the class in which I learned that I could indeed understand and appreciate poetry on a deep level. So I keep the book easily accessible wherever I am--I even kept it available during the ten or twelve weeks that I was living with Brian and Emily this summer. It's got sentimental value for me in addition to the value of Eliot's verse. But the busyness of the last few months has kept me away from the book for longer than usual.

I have replenished my pleasure reading after a trip to the library. I am now going to be reading The Art of the Infinite, a book about mathematics, and Del amor y otros demonios (On love and other demons) by Gabriel García Márquez. I had forgotten to take a book from my Spanish bookshelf while I was home, so I felt frustrated that I didn't have anything to read in Spanish. But when I was at the library I noticed a collection of books in Spanish that I had not seen before. So I have my nonfiction in English and my fiction in Spanish and I am very happy.

This past Sunday the Catholic Church in the US and some other parts of the world celebrated Epiphany. Since Christmas fell late in the week, there was only a day between when the Octave of Christmas ended and when we had the Sunday celebration of Epiphany. And I think that's a shame because the readings between the Octave and Epiphany are great: a continuation of the sequential reading from 1 John that began during the Octave, and a series of five readings from the first chapter of the Gospel of John. But that gets overridden when Christmas is late in the week, so we didn't have most of those readings this year. I noticed that the Episcopal Church still celebrates Epiphany on the 6th of January, as some Catholics do in other places, and so in some years (whenever a Sunday falls between the Octave of Christmas and the 6th, i.e., between January 2 and 5 inclusive) there is a Second Sunday after Christmas. When Whit, my Episcopalian colleague at the hospital, mentioned on Facebook about presiding at a liturgy for this Sunday celebration, I realized that I wish that the Catholic Church in the US would do that too, because that way we would preserve most of the readings from 1 John and John 1.

Okay, out of calendar calculations and back into less heady matters. One of my visits last week was to the mother of a newborn who had caught RSV but was improving. As I entered the room she was sitting in a chair with her back to the door. I introduced myself and she invited me to come in. When I came around to her I saw that she was breastfeeding her son without any covering! I stepped back and offered to return when she was done, but she was very laid back and said she didn't mind me staying if I was comfortable. So I stayed, and we had a good conversation. I thought later that it was a good thing for me to see a mother nursing a newborn, since these words from a David Haas Christmas song ("Birthsong" from the album Star Child) stood out for me this year:

Yet holiness eternal
Is perfectly expressed
In hands that clutch unthinking
And lips that tug the breast.

The milk of life is flowing
As Mary guides and feeds
Her wordless Word embodied
In infant joys and needs...

Seeing lots of babies at the hospital (and now one who was nursing) really brought alive for me the image of Jesus as a baby. I've seen babies sleeping peacefully, or happy and curious, or smiling and laughing; and I've also seen them with dirty diapers, when they're red-faced and crying, when they're fussy and restless. All these things were true of the baby Jesus as well. Birth, diapers, nursing, burping: these are all very physical things. Mary and Jesus knew all these things. (And I'd like to think Joseph was a good enough husband to help as well!) Jesus and Mary and Joseph were not very different from the babies and mothers and fathers that I've seen at the hospital. This all serves as a good reminder that the Incarnation also means physicality. Jesus was a human being with a body and experienced all the things that we embodied creatures experience, as I wrote about in my last posting.

I wish everyone who reads this blog (and also anyone who doesn't, for that matter) blessings and all good things in 2010! Incidentally, I don't know whether to say the year as "two thousand ten" or "twenty-ten." The latter fits the pattern of speech that we typically use, for most years in the last millennium, even when talking about the eleventh century. We say the Battle of Hastings was in "ten-sixty-six," or the First Crusade in "ten-ninety-five." But I never said "twenty-oh-one," "twenty-oh-two," etc. It's the "oh" that bothers me in those years. "Twenty-ten" sounds okay to me in a way that "twenty-oh-nine" did not. Maybe it's just a problem for the years with two zeros in the middle. Okay, this must be a sign that I need to go to bed. So however you say this year, I hope it's a good one!

Christmas reflection

Having spent three years in theology school getting a Master of Divinity degree, I guess it's not too surprising that Christmas tends to provoke me to theological thought and reflection. These last several months (and, actually, most of 2009) have been difficult for me: relationships, my last semester of graduate school, moving to a new city for my first real full-time job, and tremendous vocational uncertainties. And in my chaplaincy job I am exposed to the dark side of life--illness, death, suffering, family discord, abuse--more than most people are. So I'm thinking about how the Incarnation means that God takes on all the crappy aspects of being human: ignorance, suffering, fear, misunderstanding, illness, suffering, death. Yes, by becoming human God 'learned' about the pleasures of human touch and affection, restful sleep, eating good food, and so forth. But in the person of Jesus the Christ, God experienced all the limitations of human existence as well. God knew what it was like to hunger and thirst. God felt what it was like to be hurt, to feel sick, to feel lonely, to have aches and pains, to have good desires and wishes that can't be satisfied, to feel anger and frustration and disappointment and heartache, to mourn, to be afraid, to approach death, to die. God came alongside us and experienced all these things just as we do. And then Easter Sunday followed Good Friday. The shadow side of human life was redeemed, recreated in the resurrection. (I've loved the insight that the resurrection happened on the first day of the week, which in the Jewish mentality, was the first day of creation, and so the resurrection of Jesus, although we commemorate it with a day of rest, was a day of God's creative activity.) And once this redemption and recreation happened, we got the flip side of God becoming human, as the Church fathers pointed out--human beings were given the ability to share God's own divine life. I hope to be able to move into contemplation of the redeemed and recreated aspect of human existence soon, but for right now my mental energy is still in the idea of God experiencing the crappy aspects of life.

I've been on-call for the downtown hospitals today. While working on Christmas Day is not something that too many people relish (one exception being my colleague Daphne at Mass. General), I have to say that it's been a pretty good day so far. My visits have all been good--some happy (a baby whose condition has improved dramatically and will go home from the PICU soon, an elderly woman who wanted to receive Communion in honor of Christ's birthday), some not so happy (an adult death, a family coming to terms with an imminent death), but all sacred, all holy. And I got dinner on the house--not what you'd call a gourmet feast, since it is cafeteria food, but a nice gesture by the hospital in appreciation of our work today. And this after the head of the pastoral care department treated us all to lunch yesterday. So I do feel recognized and appreciated. And even though I am working on a holiday, it is good for me to be here.

Last night I had Christmas with my mother's side of the family. We all went to mass together, then we gathered at Uncle Pat and Aunt Melaine's for ham and corn pudding and German coleslaw and German potato salad and plenty of desserts. We exchanged gifts between grandparents and grandchildren and between aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. One of the neat things about living in Louisville is the opportunity to connect more often with my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Two of my cousins are in college, so we're close enough in age that we have enough experiences in common to really connect with each other. And while I can't connect in that same way with my preteen cousins, I do have more opportunities to talk with them and get to know them. After all, for biblical societies cousins were more like siblings. So why shouldn't I get to know and love my cousins better?

escape from quarantine

I don't know whether or not it was obvious--the last post was written on the day that I had a fever over 102 degrees. I missed all last week at work due to a case of the flu. Even though I had gotten both the H1N1 and the regular seasonal flu vaccines, the latter virus still found me. It wasn't a particularly harsh case of the flu, however: just a fever (never measured over 102.4), a sore throat, and a stuffy nose. I could still get up and move around my apartment without problems. I contrast this to the flu my dad had when I was born. He could barely drive over to the hospital to pick Mom and me up. When he got back home he went to bed and was on his back for a week with a very nasty flu. So I really didn't have much to complain about. In fact, I actually had a pretty good state of mind through most of the week. This surprised me because even a little sickness, like a seasonal cold, tends to lower my spirits a lot. But I just took it in stride, sleeping when I felt I needed to, writing my final evaluation for CPE, watching TV, praying the Liturgy of the Hours when I felt like it, listening to podcasts, etc. I think it let out my inner monk--the solitude and quiet didn't really bother me. But by Friday afternoon, when I was free from quarantine, I was feeling a bit antsy to get outside and do something.

So it was convenient that the choirs of the Catholic and Episcopal cathedrals here in Louisville had a joint Christmas concert Friday night at the Episcopal cathedral. Most of the music was very good. What I didn't like were several instances where traditional carols were sung to new music--"The Holly and the Ivy," "Away in a Manger," "Joy to the World," etc. Maybe it's some music thing that I don't understand, being a non-musician, but I don't see the point of creating new music for songs that have very beautiful music already. Whit was there and introduced me to the canon of the cathedral as well as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky. So I guess I'm branching out to meet the hierarchy of other Christian denominations as well as of my own. At this rate I'll be having coffee with the Pope or tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury any day now. Actually, in all seriousness, either would be pretty cool. Both the Pope and Dr. Williams are accomplished and respected theologians, and I have read at least an article by each of them.

I am giving myself permission to take an extended break from I Believe in the Holy Spirit. It's just not really exciting to pick up in the morning, and reading in little tiny pieces doesn't help me in the comprehension of an already dense and fairly scholarly work of systematic theology. It worked this summer when I had almost an hour commute each way on the T in Boston between the apartment in Dorchester and the Theology and Ministry Library at Boston College. But it doesn't work well now. So I came to a good stopping point and have laid it aside, not sure when I'll pick it up again. Now I can start using the library to get some books that I really want to read. In the meantime, I have Canto general. I continue to desire to get into it a little each Sunday, but that just doesn't happen most weeks. But at least I haven't lost my touch. I read a poem today for just the second time, and I understood it much better than the first time, and I drew connections between words, and just had a ball with it. And all this because the late Fr. Thomas Coskren, OP, was a good teacher and I was a receptive student.