Are We There Yet?

Dear Kate,

Are we there yet? we ask. When is this pandemic going to end? we mean.

But where are you going? Where were you heading, before COVID? What is this "normal" we are wanting back so badly, in such a big hurry, and to some, at all costs?

One thing for sure, our hindsight will forever be 2020. Like a veteran who shall till his end see and hear and smell from the vantage of the trenches.

One day when we look back, most surely again and again, on 2020, how are we going to feel? What sort of story are we going to tell? What kind of legacy are we leaving behind?

You all know the Oasis song (more like an anthem now) "Don't Look Back In Anger". Will you take the advice from the rock-n-rollers, and not look back one day with indignation?

Noel Gallagher, the song's writer, commented recently, "It started off as a song of defiance, about this woman: She's metaphorically seeing the diary of her life pass by, and she's thinking, 'You know what? I have no regrets.' She's raising a glass to it."

No regrets. Won't look back in anger. After all is said and done. Can we? When you are lying in your deathbed, being trapped in a care home by another outbreak with yet another funny, impersonal, science-fiction name, will you be raising a glass to your life, to it all, in "defiance" of decay and dis-ease?

Where is hope? What is hope? Why do we even want to ask, if WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)? Raise our glass if we still have one, we the young and strong and beautiful, fill it with whatever anesthetic the world prescribes and we pay for, day after day, with our blood sweat and tears. Do not go gentle into that good night. See how strange it is that our song about not looking back in anger is really a very angry song?

Desperate people, do we know them? Do they see the hope in us? Do they come to us for some Good News in a bad news world?

We Christians are good sympathizers, decent enough cheerleaders, but as to living in and living out the mystery of a God hanged high and dry for the hunger of vultures and mockery of human cultures, a plain fact on wood that simultaneously answers to everything and explains nothing, we rarely honored the call to embrace the glory and sorrow of being human.

The scared ones scatter, like the disciples looking up, at the cross, from afar, shaking, wanting out. Where are we when our neighbors, brothers and sisters need us the most? We are not there yet, not where Jesus was, not close enough to where He calls us to be.

Yet we feel the weight of glory in someone like Bill, who gently and most confidently enjoined our church community this past Sunday to discern in our life the "pattern of protection"---and, let me add to that, glimmers of grace and harbors of hope. Bill, who was taken away from his family at the age of three and placed in the residential school system, did not look back in anger, even though he has all the reasons in the world to. He told us stories about roots of wild plants, a wrong kind of wood asking to be fashioned into the right kind of drum, all sacraments of grace and hope and the peace of God which transcends all understanding. Angels tremble for a life like Bill's.

"Christian life, Christian ministry, is not a matter of calculation or of realism. Risk is incalculable, grace is incalculable, Christ is incalculable. He calls us to abandon policy and protectiveness, to attend to and respond to his Word sounding in all human hurt, to be wounded and find out our helplessness – and there to meet the absolute gratuity and unexpectedness of his measureless compassion. But he will not wipe the tears from our eyes until we have learned to weep."

"Your will be done." Jesus cries for what the Father cries for, and gives His life for the longing. Do we?

Going there together, in Jesus, Alex