Products |
SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Easter. All rise. Some soar. And then – can I really be saying this? — there are angels.
By
Published: Apr 12, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
CAPTION: At Salem Moravian Graveyard — referred to as God’s Acre, as are all Moravian burial grounds — there are graves for 7,000 men, women, and children. In death, all are equal. God’s Acre consists of rows of flat markers of white marble. Each is 20 inches by 24 inches, four inches high, pointing east. On each stone is the name of the deceased, the dates of birth and death, and perhaps a short verse of scripture or a heartfelt tribute. On the Saturday before Easter, the church members go to the Moravian cemetery, scrub the graves, and decorate them with flowers.
—-
I have read that when the great Tibetan saint Milarepa (1052-1135) died, the sky was filled with angels.
Hebrews 1:14 poses it as a question, but not really: “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?”
I’ve been forever ambivalent about angels. Leaning toward the negative, mostly. In a long career in journalism, I mostly saw good people getting crushed, or, heroically, fighting against ridiculous odds.
These last few weeks when Twitter or the Times serves up a video of a hospital nurse who’s just finished her shift, I’ve pressed play.
This is a given: every cop, every fireman, every doctor, every ambulance driver, every postman, every teacher, every restaurant delivery guy — they’re all heroes. But these women — the videos I’ve seen haven’t given me a man — are in the room when people die. Or they enter a room to find a patient already dead. And then they call the families. Again and again and again.
They surely know that their government has abandoned them. They have seen colleagues go down, and they know there’s a good chance they’ll get sick or die. They may well have heard that the country will soon be open for business because the plague is officially over, and that they’ll be thanked for their service and shoved into a memory hole.
I am a Russian Jew, tough, hard to kill, but I don’t believe I could do their job. More: I no longer believe humans can do this, day after day, week after week. I believe these nurses must have immense faith in something larger than we can see, and that faith has lifted them up and transformed them. So as I watch the videos of nurses, the image on the screen changes. Angels. I’m watching angels.
Because I can be slow and stupid, I have only just realized 1) I have been blessed beyond all reasonable expectation, and if you want to say angels have looked out for me, I’ll concede the argument, and 2) I’ve encountered some angels along the way. Writers and musicians, mostly, but that’s more of a statement about the narrowness of my experience than anything else.
If you happen to know any angels — I have to smile as I type those words — I’d love to hear from you. And share them. Again: HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com
Here are some of my angels…
JOHN O’DONOHUE
“Endings seem to lie in wait,” John O’Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 4, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53.
He never failed to connect the worldly with the sacred — and see it all as holy. As a writer and a man, he reminded me of the priest who was a friend of Proust’s. Yes, he believed there was a Hell. But he didn’t believe anyone went there. John was like that: “I think the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again.”
Death was nothing to him — a silent friend who walks beside us all our days. And on the other side? “I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us,” he wrote. “Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by.”
Please watch this:
KATIE PORTER
You will recall how the Congresswoman from Orange County, armed with a white board and her mouth, badgered a government weasel into agreeing that everyone in the country could be tested… at no cost. (That didn’t happen. And won’t.) On Friday, she had a virtual visit from Samantha Bee:
“Are you exhausted from appearing in every Republican’s nightmares?” Bee asked.
No, that’s a very comfortable role for me. If you’re full of bullshit, I’m coming for ya. I just don’t have time. I’m a single mom. The dinner’s burning. I’m late to something. I have 4,000 emails. My hair is frizzy. I haven’t shaved my legs in a week. No bullshit.”
In 36 hours, the clip has been viewed 2.5 million times.
LORI LIGHTFOOT
The Mayor of Chicago released a photo: hands raised, mouth engaged, with this text: YOUR JUMP SHOT IS ALWAYS GONNA BE WEAK. STAY OUT OF THE PARKS. Caption: “Just a friendly reminder from your Auntie to stay home.” What endears her to me is that she’s not just “friendly.” At a press conference announcing a 9 PM curfew for liquor stores, she said she had ordered groups of people to “break it up” while driving in a North Side neighborhood. “And I’ll continue to do that. I mean what I say. We have to protect ourselves. We have to be smart about what we’re doing in the course of this pandemic. And if it means that I drive around and check whether or not people are in compliance, I am happy to do it.”
DAVID CARR
David Carr, the much loved New York Times media critic, died at his desk. The obit suggests the epic range of his life.
As a writer, David was wonderfully tart:
Ann Coulter: “Seeing hate speech pop out of a blonde who knows her way around a black cocktail dress makes for compelling viewing.”
Neil Young: “His brokenness has annealed rather than slowed him.”
Philip Seymour Hoffman: “He got in the ring with his addiction and battled it for two decades successfully.”
He wrote The Night of the Gun, a great book about his own addiction: It’s in no way pretty: “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a guy threw himself under a crosstown bus and lived to tell the tale,” he wrote. “Is that a book you’d like to read?”
A collection of his work, Final Draft: The Collected Work of David Carr, has just been published.
It includes something priceless: the syllabus of the journalism class he taught at Boston University. Samples:
“If you text or email during class, I will ignore you as you ignore me. It won’t go well.”
“I expect you to behave as an adult and will treat you like one. I don’t want to parent you — I want to teach you.”
“Excuses: don’t make them – they won’t work. Stories are supposed to be on the page, and while a spoken-word performance might explain everything, it will excuse nothing.”
“If you are having trouble understanding expectations or assignments or instruction, please speak up. I care a lot about not leaving anybody behind.”
“I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve,” he wrote at the conclusion of “The Night of the Gun,” “but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.”
EMMYLOU HARRIS
Over 40 years and a dozen Grammys, Emmylou Harris followed her instincts, and, in the process, avoided sudden spikes and tumbles. She has graced hundreds of records as a celestial back-up singer and duet partner. The verdict is generous: There are, a critic has said, no bad Emmylou Harris records — only good ones and better ones.
For my piece about a release she titled “Hard Bargain,” we talked. I cherish her wisdom in this exchange, at the end of our conversation:
JK: Paul Simon says, “When I’m in the music, I’m no age.” And as a performer, you too have achieved around 40 years of visible past. No surprise that your new CD is drenched in time — time as a force, almost a character. How heavy does that feel?
EH: Paul’s right — time is light when I’m making music. Other times it ranges from heavy to inconsequential. But the press of time? It’s always there. And it’s sometimes a wonder — I can’t believe that I’m at this age and still working and have all these things I want to do. In that, I’m lucky. I’m healthy and in better shape than I was 30 years ago.
JK: Energy, creative spark, opportunity — so why name the CD “Hard Bargain?”
EH: Just being in the world is a hard bargain. Everything has a price, a blessing and a curse. It’s relentless. We can’t really resist life — we’re pulled back into it.
JK: What’s the reward?
EH: The reward is that we’re here.
REBECCA ELSON
Rebecca Elson was a Canadian astronomer who did a post-doctoral research fellowship examining Hubble telescope data at Princeton. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and died, at 39, in 1999. After her death, her poems were published. The book’s title: A Responsibility to Awe. This poem seems appropriate now.
“Antidotes to Fear of Death”
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
BRIAN FALLON
He’s from New Jersey. White. Big-hearted. Anthemic. 4-star writer. If Springsteen had a son…, And he’s romantic, a high value for me. Like this, from his new CD:
One day I believe that we’ll be carried away by pretty horses
And the night will open wide
We’ll stretch our arms and float out in her river
And your life would be my light
And in our love we find forgiveness
And in our fear we learn to see
And in my chains I saw us running
Free as all the pretty horses in my dreams
Maybe it was planned when the angels spoke your name into existence
That our hearts would be entwined
And only time and life and a little distance
Until I could be with you
And in our love we find forgiveness
And in our fear we learn to see
And in my chains I saw us running
Free as all the pretty horses in my dreams
Maybe it was planned when the angels spoke your name into existence
That our hearts would be entwined
And only time and life and a little distance
Until I could be with you
And in our love we find forgiveness
And in our fear we learn to see
And in my chains I saw us running
Free as all the pretty horses in my dreams
And we don’t mind the weight we carry
We don’t talk about no wasted years
And I’ll be right here to lean on if the livin’ gets too heavy
And the darkness comes a’snappin’ at your heels
We don’t mind the weight we carry
We don’t talk about no wasted years
