A Certain Reticence

"From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the black population, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for color or background. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not because this was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtues was a certain reticence concerning personal misfortune."

Gabriel García Márquez, "Love in the Time of Cholera"

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Dear Kate,

What is your Gethsemane?

If you think you have had one, then maybe you haven't had any yet.  It will be worse than anything we have ever experienced.

What and when and how do you think it will be?  At your deathbed?  Getting fired from your job?  Losing a loved one?  Being burned up by war fire?

Many I know commented whereas there is never a good time to experience a pandemic, the solace we are having in Vancouver now is that the sun is shining and everything growing.

But what if it isn't?  What if rain is pouring?  What if it is dark outside?  What if rain falls only on your leaky roof and darkness darkens only your house?

It's called loneliness, being forsaken, abandoned, unspoken for.

Who's going to be there with you, for you?  Friends?  Which friend?  The one who has nothing but platitude to expound on?  The one who has a sunny, triumphant religion to enlist you to and march together towards the street of gold?  The ones with whom you have collectively self-identified as "foodies" and "travel bugs" and, I don't know, "sunbathers" or "bitcoin hunters"?

They do care, you know, when you are at that dark place.  They really really want to care and tried very hard too.  But they don't know how.  All life long you've been practicing with your friends "one of the most widespread virtues" that was "a certain reticence concerning personal misfortune," and now the alphabets you seek to speak about your sorrows escape everyone.  Your friends look at your twisted face with tears going down their own, but all you want is for them to look away so that you can spit out their pity into the muted-pink kidney dish lying between the two unbridgeable worlds.

Of course before this there have been sadness and setbacks along the way and sometimes even collectively, but the language to talk meaningfully about them was sporadic and haphazard, slapped together for those special occasions that were meant to be temporary (and sure enough they were, when youth was on your side).  The champagne after was what you wanted to remember and keep re-traditioning with your friends, not the disappointments and defeats and deafening silence of God.

Wordless, you are truly all alone now in Gethsemane.

And you remember the pandemic in the spring of 2020, how it was bad but not-so-bad in a way that there was a lot of sun, that everybody was in the suffering, albeit to different degrees, that a common vocabulary was put together, however clumsily, to make sense of the senseless, for and with each other.

Then you imagine, what if it is not a virus that a person by and large hasn't done anything bad to have succumbed to it?  What if there is guilt and shame on your part in your downfall?  And if I am even half honest about life and myself, have I--or any human being--ever been a pure victim of circumstances, however black-and-white the moral outlook of the matter from my own perspective?  Was there ever a time when injustice was done against me that I didn't add to it and amplify evil?  I won't even mention injustice I've created ex nihilo, or done against the very people I claim to love and now from whom I want the most their understanding and sympathy, speaking with me and for me.  I haven't compile the statistic, but I can see myself sinning against God three to five times going through one grocery line-up.  Yet when it was happening, I wasn't aware.  Or to put it theologically, the Spirit wasn't alive and well in me.

It is in this rock-hard determination to deny our true human nature, our brokenness and tendency to break, the recalcitrant refusal to see our own face however darkly, to acknowledge and work out our entanglement "in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world, a neighborhood of chaos," that Easter came and went and left only a whiff.

Who needs living again if we live as if we are not going to die and everyday fight to our last breath to prove our religion true?  Who needs forgiveness when forgetfulness is good enough to make us stay "optimistic" and "positive"?  Who wants to stay there in Gethsemane, even as a friend beside our Selves, to smell our own rotting, if we can fast-forward to the happy ending--we were told--vouchsafed for us somewhere over the rainbow, just for subscribing to the right ideas, doing the right things, getting along with the right people?  Can't we justify ourselves, be left alone to plead our way away from our bitter cups?

It is in our prayer being answered that left all alone we will be.

Yours, Alex