2020: Goodbye, Adios, Farewell--We Won't Soon Forget You

 "Hope...Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

2020.

Don’t let the door hit you in the fanny on the way out.  All’s well that ends well…or that ends not so well.  Should auld acquaintance be forgot? I’ve no idea what “auld” means but should 2020 be forgot? Yup. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Awful old year. The best is yet to come for the worst is almost done. (Made that one up myself!) New Year’s Eve! Old Year Leave!

I’m trying to come with up with as many New Year’s cliches as I can, then adapt them for this eve of 2020, when this year, this YEAR, finally, thankfully, comes to a close on the 31^st at just after 11:59:59 pm. Can’t come soon enough.

On a “normal” New Year’s Eve, I’d be in Florida with my beloved relatives: eating way too much of my Aunt Donna’s good cooking and getting a big steak out at a restaurant and going to the movies three or four times and treating my two cousins to brand new books at Barnes & Noble and reveling in the Christmas lights as they glow, dance, and blink, all strung from the palm trees.

But thanks to COVID there’s no chance I’ll get on a plane and I may just stay home. If I do decide to drive north and be with my “pod” friends, it will be in a very chilly place, as far from “highs in the seventies and sunny” as you can get. The love I’ll experience with them will absolutely be warm but it will be wicked cold outside. First time in 17 years I’m not heading south.

Thanks, COVID.          

There are so, so many other things from 2020 I just want to leave behind. Lockdowns. No attending a live baseball game in summer, for the first time in my adult life.  Zoom meetings and watching in shock and awe as family and friends and co-workers freeze up on the screen, like latter day Max Headrooms. When this is all finally over I won’t miss spending the majority of my time at my home office dining room table. Never thought I’d say it but I miss my real office. I will be so excited for the day when hugs are allowed again.  Can’t wait to stand in the receiving line at church after worship and shake as many hands as I want. Remember handshaking? I won’t miss being shocked at how many pages the obituaries take up in the Sunday newspaper, or hearing from friends that their parent or grandparent was taken by the virus. Won’t miss the worry I have for my eighty-something year old Mom and my immuno-compromised sister. God, please keep them safe.

But if I’m really, really honest with myself, there are actually things I want to hang onto from 2020. Lessons I want to keep, that have made me spiritually grow, because I walked through such an intense year and am almost at the end. My faith teaches me that redemption can be found even in the worst of times, that everything can be redeemed, found to have some good, some blessing.

So, post 2020, I want to never, ever want to take for granted the folks who love me in this life and the folks I love so much. My renewed connections this year with family and friends, though mostly virtual, have been a revelation. Who’d have thought a pandemic would deepen our human bonds?

My oldest and best friends in the world? We’ve met every single Thursday night since early spring and that weekly Zoom session has been a lifeline for me. Corny jokes and remembering when and burdens shared. What a gift. My brother somehow found a way in early November to throw me a COVID safe surprise birthday party. Thanks Ed. Best birthday ever! In the church I serve I’ve led a group of seniors in Zoom Bible study, almost every single Wednesday morning since March. God always shows up too. My choir friends and I mourn this life without in person singing, but still we faithfully gather virtually and have even recorded some songs. Amazing. And there’s my friend Jill. Since COVID broke out we’ve walked the many cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood on so many afternoons. With each step we listen and we complain and we laugh and we check in and we remember what it is to just be human and to support one other person in the walk called life. 

Goodbye 2020.  I will never, ever forget you. None of us will. You’ve broken our collective hearts but out of that heartache, we’ve actually been able to find some good too.

Farewell. Adieu. Adios. Aloha. See ya later alligator. Not.

That’s all folks. Thank God.

 

 

      

       

 

Washing the Dishes: How the Ordinary In Life Will Save Us

“In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.”   

--Mike Lancaster, American author

The extraordinary. The ordinary.

Wash the pots and pans and pile them up on the counter to dry. Bake rye bread. Boy, does that taste so good, toasted and with peanut butter! Write my weekly newspaper column. What will this week’s topic be? Sing and record the bass parts for my virtual choir. Snow blow the end of the driveway so the ice doesn’t build up. Take a walk on a chilly afternoon and listen to the crunch of snow underfoot. Write a letter to my friend Eric in Minnesota. I loved the birthday note he sent to me. And don’t forget to make a dentist appointment.

Pretty ordinary things to do on a pretty ordinary Monday in the ordinary month of  December. Thank you God, just today, for the ordinary.

Ordinary tasks calling out to me, the mundane and seemingly ho-hum activities that make up my life and that take up all human lives. Grocery shopping and fixing dinner and helping with homework. Little things we accomplish, the to-do list with activities that are not earth shattering or unprecedented, that don’t have much at stake and are absolutely not extraordinary.

The ordinary: it makes up most of the time we are allotted on this earth. That’s a truth I need to hang onto for dear life and sanity in these extraordinary days.

For along with COVID fatigue, I am also struggling with an affliction I call “extraordinary fatigue.” Being bombarded on a daily basis with the extraordinary, the unprecedented, the intense. Life in a year unlike any other year I’ve ever experienced. I’m getting sick of it. Feeling that life’s volume is turned up to eleven and I can never turn it down, or mute the incessant chatter of doom and gloom, or just turn off the ferocity of living. I’m wrung out by it all, emotionally exhausted and I’m ready to move on to the normal, the predictable, the boring even!

But the extraordinary: we all face it. Days and nights of lockdowns and fear of lockdowns and cancelled holidays and remote schooling and economic angst and becoming a “zoombie” with all those hours staring at a screen. But wait—there’s more! An election that’s over but apparently it’s not over for tens of millions of my fellow citizens. Hope for a vaccine as soon as possible but ominous warnings too about the dark days of winter yet to come. Wondering when I will once again be free to actually be with people, closer than six feet and for longer than one hour and without a blasted mask covering my face!

So, my prayer this day is pretty simple: God, wake me up to the ordinary details of life that I need to do, to think about, to plan for, to tackle, and most important to be thankful for.

I have a feeling that the ordinary is what will get me, get all of us, through to the other side of these extraordinary days. The ordinary is what will keep our paths straight and our thoughts sane and our hearts full and our souls serene. The ordinary. The woodworking projects I have planned out for the months ahead: building blanket chests for my three nieces. The recipes I will experiment with in my slow cooker and the loaves of bread I will bake and then share with my friends as a way to say, “I love you.”       

One of my favorite religious icons is a drawing of Saint Therese of Lisieux, standing at a sink and doing the dishes, as the steam rises up, like incense, like a prayer, to heaven. As her fellow saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, noted, “God walks among the pots and pans.”  God walks among the ordinary things of life. In a saints’ past and in the right now too. 

God help us all to embrace the ordinary, as we continue to walk through these extraordinary times. For the divine is right here, right with us, right now. The holy. The eternal.  That which saves us. May we all remember this small miracle the next time we wash the pots and pans.

The ordinary? It is extraordinary.

 

 

       

   

   

 

 

 

 

For Real Happiness? Let Go of Expectations. Let Life Unfold.

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”                        --Michael J. Fox, actor and activist, with Parkinson’s disease

A sixteen pound turkey, hot out of the oven.  A house filled with overnight holiday guests, friends and family gathered for a multi-day celebration.  Watching my favorite Thanksgiving movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, with my Godson, and laughing at the same goofy jokes every year. Twelve sets of hands connected around the table, each of us saying what we were most thankful for on that fourth Thursday of November.

That is not what happened last week at my home, not even close.

Instead almost every single cherished holiday tradition I was so ready to mark and carry out in 2020—none occurred. All the typical hopes I usually have for my favorite holiday of the year? None came true, not even one. The rituals I was so used to: these could not be practiced either, not in these strange days. 

Instead, I cooked a big steak on the grill, and baked a potato and steamed some asparagus, for my Turkey day meal, and then watched solo, a favorite movie. I hung out with loved ones, not in person, but over Zoom. I made my first ever pumpkin pie, with a crust from scratch, because there was no one else to bake. I spent two hours with friends in my COVID pod, in person, for pie and football, but not for too long, to keep it safe. I spoke by phone with all of the folks I’d have usually given a big hug too.

And it was still a great Thanksgiving, one I will never, ever forget, that’s for sure.

But in order for me to experience that day in a brand new way, to be open to the surprises and gifts that life sent my way, I had to let go of something I often hang on to so tightly, for dear life even. My expectations: what I believed that day should have been like. My expectations of how everything was supposed to unfold. My stubborn insistence that this day had to be just like all of my other Thanksgivings in years past.

Here’s the miracle.

When I let go, life unfolded before me in ways I could never have predicted and for that, I am truly thankful. When I decided to jettison expectations, my heart opened and my mind opened. I was ready to experience this sometimes weird and unpredictable life in wholly new ways. That was my best holiday gift so in 2020, by far. Good spiritual practice, too, for year-end holy days and holidays, less than a month away. Good spiritual outlook to embrace for the rest of life too. 

To expect less. To temper expectations. To accept life more. To be ready and even excited about just what might happen, but only if we are willing to give up our need to control circumstances that are finally beyond our control.  Like a pandemic.

The first time I was introduced to this discipline of letting go was through one of the best loved prayers in the world, “The Serenity Prayer”, written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and first publicly prayed in 1943, at a church in the small town of Heath, Massachusetts.  It’s since been adopted by millions of people, especially folks in recovery from addiction, but its philosophy holds true for all of life.

He wrote, “God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s the line many of us already know by heart, wise advice, absolutely. But it’s a line in the original long version of the prayer that really challenges me to examine everything I expect in life, even demand, sometimes. 

“Living one day at a time. Enjoying one moment at a time….Taking this…world as it is, and not as I would have it, that I may be reasonably happy in this life….”

Reasonably happy!

When I approach life, with all of its unpredictability and all of its pain and all of its joy, with that one hope—reasonable happiness--life rarely disappoints me. For every day, even in the struggles, as with COVID, we can always find something beautiful, some grace, some blessing, some relationship, to be grateful for.  And some expectation to let go of.

So, this December, in 2020 and beyond…may God, may whatever higher power holds the universe together: may this spirit grant us wisdom, grant us acceptance and grant us courage, for the living of these remarkable days.

 

 

    

  

         

 

. 

             

 

 

2020: The Year With and The Year Without

 I had a dream, which was not all a dream. 

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars 

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day

--Lord Byron, 1816

The year without….

With a little more than forty days left, mercifully, in the year 2020, I’ve begun to think about how future historians might look back on this oddest and hardest and cruelest of years. How they might name it, portray 2020. To fully understand a given time in history, two things have to happen: we have to be well past it and I’d say by at least a decade. And we have to name it, capture it somehow, with a pithy or easy to remember catchphrase, that somehow perfectly reflects the times we lived in.

Think the roaring twenties, a decade of radical change in the United States. The Great Depression, a term that captures ten years of the worst ever economic downturn in the industrialized world. We remember specific days when history turned and everything changed. December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor is attacked and the United States roars into the Second World War. November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is gunned down in Dallas, Texas and that most violent and fractious of decades, the sixties, really begin.

But years?

Individual years that marked a pivot point, a macro shift? 1776: a nation is born. 1865: a nation torn in two by its bloodiest war ever, lays down its arms. All good, but I wanted to find an actual named year, a year clearly and dramatically described in just one elegant phrase and I found it, tucked away in America’s attic.

1816: the year without a summer.

It’s mostly forgotten now, but in 1816, because of a massive volcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia, the world’s atmosphere was choked by huge amounts of dust, lowering the temperature worldwide and blotting out the sun and its warmth for millions of people around the globe. It led to massive crop failures and starvation. New England was plunged into the dark and cold as it had never, ever been, in what was supposed to be summertime. One Massachusetts historian wrote: “Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots....Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food.”

1816: the year without.

Maybe tomorrow’s historians will also call 2020 a “year without”, as well. When I think of this year that’s what most strikes me. All of the things, all of the rituals, all of the norms, all of the activities that were curtailed or just cancelled. The year without Thanksgiving or Christmas. The year without crowds. The year without live theater or live music or choirs or going to the movies. The year without human touch. The year without going to church or mosque or synagogue. The year without crowded malls or full school buses or packed restaurants and bars.

It has been a year without, absolutely.

But being a person of faith who needs to find some good, some hope, history redeemed, I also see that its been a “year of”, too, in 2020. A year of record breaking voter turnout, the most active and robust exercise of our right to vote since 1908. The year with amazing human adaptation, millions of us learning new ways to live and work, being forced by circumstances to adapt and then doing so amazingly well. The year of courage and wisdom: from doctors and nurses and teachers and store clerks, first responders and scientists and researchers. The year we remembered the importance of all of the intimate and social connections in our lives: how easy it is to take these for granted. How much these face to face relationships are missed right now. Remember hugs?

No matter how we remember it in the days and years to come, 2020 will always be a year. A YEAR. The year, at least in our times and in our memories. Of that there is absolutely no doubt. 

2020. The year with and the year without.

That works.  

 

          

Are We Are All In This Together? That's What's On The Ballot.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”                      --Abraham Lincoln

The first lesson about leadership I learned, was as a ninth grade football player and the quarterback for my high school team. We were led by our coach, let’s call him Coach Jim, and he coached us in a way I’ve since learned by personal experience and study, is about the worst strategy to bring folks together. The worst way to motivate others. The worst way to unify disparate group of folks. The worst way to lead.

He was a bully.

He ruled the field and the locker room, not with inspiration or support or encouragement or joy at play, but instead with fear; with threats, with anger and with such mean spiritedness that he drove me to quit the sport, one I’d loved since I first took to the gridiron in the fifth grade. At practice the air was filled with expletives, shouted at full volume at the team, and so we learned to just put our heads down and play, hoping Coach would not single us out for a tongue lashing before our peers. We were afraid of his wrath. The violence of our sport was reflected in the violence of his rhetoric and actions.    

When he did wind up to let us know how he was really feeling, his face would turn a deep shade of red and the spittle would fly from his mouth and his words would flow with such contempt for us that we prayed for play to end early. Coach was in a bad mood.  The irony is that for all his blow hardy speeches and closed fist threats and arrogance, our team played awfully.  We allowed him to divide us and be pitted against one another. He imagined he was bringing out the best in us, I suppose, but the truth was he was a terrible coach. That season we lost more than we won and rarely had any fun as we played.

So much for a bully’s ability to lead, to evoke the better angels in human nature.

I can’t get this notion of bullying off of my mind as our nation goes to the polls next week and decides our national fate and direction for the next four years. It has been an ugly, ugly campaign season and an ugly, ugly year for human behavior in our land. Who could have imagined the image of armed protesters, bullies, storming the state capitol in Michigan this summer in response to the lockdown? The blatant disregard, even contempt, so many of my fellow citizens have shown for science and public health, that folks would actually see the rejection of mask wearing as a symbol of liberty, patriotism even? 

Are we living in a parallel universe? Is this really America?

Though in some places the threat of COVID has brought us together and inspired compassionate and wise leadership, in other places, for lack of such moral leadership, through bullying leadership, the virus now threatens us two-fold. First, with the threat of getting sick and then with the threat of watching us come apart at the seams as a country, our devolution as a democracy.

Instead of leaders evoking the best in us, our angels, too many leaders instead evoke the worst in their followers. Inspire violence and hate, not peace and cooperation. Call out for cruelty and not compassion, meanness and not mercy.  

Last March as COVID spread throughout the land, I was idealistic and hopeful. I prayed to God that this shared threat would bring out the best in us as fellow citizens. To each do our parts to keep the whole healthy and well and unified. To sacrifice for a neighbor: to mask up and distance and take good care. Together, we would get through this. When Americans are unified, anything is possible.

But if competent leadership is not there to move the masses to act with such virtue, it will not happen. So, even though we are facing into the worst heath crisis our nation has faced in 100 years, are now almost eight months into what might continue for another year, we are sick in a way. We are diseased civically, and we are in critical care as a national community.

That’s the price we pay when bullies lead.

Chaos. Fear. Danger. Incompetence. Disunity. It doesn’t matter if it is on a football field or in a family or a corporate boardroom or in the halls of government.

Thus, in the days ahead I offer this prayer for our land. That we might led by those who bring out the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln once said. That we might move off of the sidelines of democracy and get right into the thick of it, into the contest. Vote. Organize. Be informed. Take responsibility for our citizenship.  That America might live up to the noblest of our shared ideals: neighbor helping neighbor, and always, ALWAYS remembering….

We are all in this together.

 

 

 

   

 

                        

 

Democracy: Struggling But Always Our Best and Final Hope

“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”     

--Winston Churchill

I’m a democracy geek.

It helps to have been born on election day 1960. To mark that day my paternal grandmother insisted I be named after the very first Irish-Catholic ever to be elevated to the highest office in the land, thus my moniker, “John Fitzgerald”.  

I was a political science major at the University of Massachusetts and the very first homework assignment I received was to read a speech by none other than President John F. Kennedy, on the virtues of public service.

I’m a democracy supporter.

Okay, I did fail to vote in one Presidential election, when I was a young adult, so focused then on the turbulence of my own life that I failed to cast a ballot. But on every other first Tuesday in November since I turned 18, I’ve exercised the franchise and let my voice be heard. For me, voting is like going to civic church.

I will be working the polls come November 3^rd, as I have for the last three Presidential elections. This year I will be masked up and gloved up and face-shielded up behind a wall of plexiglass, checking in voters. Especially now I want to be there in person, as a poll worker for the town. I want to do whatever I can to ensure that votes are cast freely, and without intimidation or bias or chicanery.

I’m a democracy cheerleader.

Yes: I even still sometimes choke up when I sing the national anthem and yes, I fly an American flag outside of my house many days. And yes, I absolutely believe that the way we freely choose to govern ourselves is the absolute best form of government on earth. I’ve no desire to live in a theocracy like Iran or a dictatorship like China or Russia.        

I say all of this not to boast or to brag but to declare that in this time in our civic life—when so many of my fellow citizens are cynical or anxious about democracy—I believe it is still right and good, to love this country and to want the best for it and to remain a true believer in the power of the people to rule.  

That’s the definition of “democracy”: the word comes from the Greek, dēmokratia ; demos meaning "common people," and kratos meaning "rule” or “strength". The people rule. This is the ideal that’s kept the United States going now, for some 244 years. Doesn’t mean that our democracy hasn’t been challenged at times in our history. We’ve been ruled at times by governments and Presidents who thought it their right and duty to act tyrannical or dictatorial, as somehow above the law.

In 1798 President John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act that made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against Congress or the president. In 1861, President Lincoln suspended the right to habeas corpus, the Constitutionally guaranteed right that one could not be arrested and jailed without sufficient evidence. In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ordering the immediate internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans as “resident enemy aliens”.  In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned in the face of overwhelming evidence that he used the power of his office to punish his so-called “enemies”.

We’ve survived this, and wannabee “kings” before and we will again.  Democracy is far more important than any one person or political party. It’s not perfect but within itself lies the seeds of and power for self-correction, for righting itself even as it sometimes goes so off course.

But democracy’s survival always depends upon a free citizenry to do their part in democracy: to vote, to be informed, to be active in our communities and yes, to even take to the streets and non-violently protest when the government or elected leaders fail in their oaths to the Constitution.

So, I say bring on November 3^rd.  We can handle it as a people, as a nation and as citizens.  The people rule. I still believe in democracy.

Do you?