by Ellen RM Toner
Perhaps, like me, you are tired of hearing about how we live in unprecedented times. Perhaps, like me, you have wryly commented with friends and family about how we wish things could go back to being just plain
precedented. Well, I’ve been coming to an epiphany, and it finally coalesced, so, here you go: These times are not unprecedented in the least. We are simply experiencing the “crisis” du jour. The only thing unusual is our reaction to them. And, that’s something we can change, meaning that we can rejoice, take a breath, and remember that the apocalypse is not upon us.
Understanding Community For a long time, I thought of myself as self-made, self-sufficient, healthy, enterprising and, ultimately, unstoppable. I took great pride in saying things like, I got my first job when I was 11, I started paying for all my own clothes when I was 14, I left home for college when I was 17 and I put myself through school, working three jobs and taking extra credits so I could finish sooner and save more on loans. And, at the age of 21, I started teaching high school. As you might be thinking, I still do take great pride in those accomplishments. Perhaps too much….
I mentioned to my dear husband last week that, over the past 5 years, I’ve been gradually coming to terms with the fact that actually I’m not very healthy. Though I am hard-working, when my Sister Ass of a body allows it, I’m astounded by how much help I need. I’m being forced to acknowledge that perhaps many of the things I did in my early years of “I can conquer the world by myself” are now catching up with me, at the ripe old age of 32. Lord help me as the decades progress!
In late September, I started shaking. Sometimes just tremors in my head, neck, and arms, sometimes my whole body. With multiple trips to the ER, visits to neurologists in Boston, and some imaging and testing completed, we know now that I don’t have a brain tumor or anything like MS, which is great. But, I do have non-epileptic seizures, or, Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder. It’s not that uncommon (one neurologist referred to it as a “known-unknown”), but “they” don’t know why it happens or how to make it stop. It gets worse when I’m tired, stressed, or when my senses get overstimulated. This has translated into me leaning on my family for a lot of help: my married sister bringing our girls to her house and leaving me dinner; my convent sister coming once a week to cook, clean, and play with her nieces; my parents bringing us casseroles and company on days when I feel disheartened, and helping us bridge the financial gap for all the medical bills. Having one more unusual health thing going on is a total drag, but having structured time and regular visits with family has been wonderful. As I look at my 7 wonderful siblings, both near and far (and think about the one in heaven), my parents’ 16 grandchildren (and counting), I keep thinking, boy are we lucky to have back-up like this—I get to be part of a clan.
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| “We must decrease, that He may increase.” |
When Jamey and I were getting married, “thrifty” as we were, we had initially planned on a small wedding. But, when I literally started having nightmares about not having people there, we realized we needed to find a way to invite everyone. So, as some of you might remember, we fed our guests beans and rice on paper and plastic, accompanied by kegs of Bud Light. And, we were able to invite over 400 people; in December in New England, over 250 of them were able to come. The priest waived the fee for using the church. A friend made the cake. Other friends brought hors d’oeuvres. Another friend sewed an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe onto the priest’s chasuble, since we were married on her feast day (having Chipotle food was liturgically correct, you might say!). Another friend made some alterations to my clearance-rack dress, and I wore my mother’s veil. My oldest sister sewed a button back on my dress minutes before I walked down the aisle. My convent sister made me a crown of flowers and my bouquet. Friends brought holly and ivy and red berries from their yards to help with the rest of the flowers. One of my little brothers emceed, and one of my bridesmaids ran the playlist on her phone for dancing. And, of course, friends sang for the wedding mass. Jamey and I have lived in a lot of places, and with a lot of different people over the years. We had friends and family there from all over New England, naturally, but also from Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Minnesota and Colorado, people we had known for decades, and maybe not seen in a decade, and people we had only known for a few months. And, they all came together to help us put on this huge, wonderful party near my hometown. It was especially the mothers of my childhood friends, who really went all out making food for the reception, who amazed me. I hadn’t really seen or talked to a lot of them in years, but they were there, ready to help. That sense of support was hugely instrumental in our decision to move back north from the DC area; we wanted our kids to grow up in a place where it was second nature to the people to take care of each other like that.
One of the things I said to Jamey as we were planning our wedding was that it wasn’t really our wedding, that we needed to remember that day that it was about the community, and that our marriage would be part of our society, and that we needed to build that give and take into the fabric of the day, to have it forefront in our minds. That’s what makes a wedding feast a Wedding Feast, with all of the theological significance that it deserves. It was, no doubt, my mother who had at some point put that idea into my head. And, just as my dad was about to walk me down the aisle, he completed that thought by leaning down and whispering to me, “We must decrease, that He may increase.”
One of the things that I’m working on with this whole seizure thing is to get my mind in a place where everything calms me down, somewhere I can go when it starts ramping up. I started out picturing this spot by the Contoocook River in Peterborough, NH, sitting with Jamey, his arm around my shoulders. We’re on a mossy, low bank, on a bench under the pine trees, with a steep hill behind us that tucks us away from the path and lets us feel focused on this wide, quiet spot in the river, which follows on the waterfall just upstream. Sounds peaceful, right? It didn’t work. I kept getting the sense of imminent danger, like we were in
Truman’s bubble world, but that the shield might be permeated at any time by the madding crowd, the sound and the fury, lurking just on the outside.
I reevaluated, and I realized that the “perfect moment” that I needed to picture was actually from our wedding day. Not a place of sheltered isolation, but a place where I was surrounded by my lifetime’s worth of friends and family. When it was time to toss the bouquet, I had a moment of inspiration where I realized I could run up to an old balcony, so I pushed aside some dusty brooms, mop buckets and room dividers and raced up the stairs. Dancing across that little balcony, with The Marvelettes singing
Too Many Fish in the Sea, and the literally hundreds of faces of loved ones looking up at me and celebrating with me—that is a memory that makes me feel truly happy, no matter what. Summed up in one word, that memory speaks of
communion: Jamey and I had given, as much as we could, to as many people as we could, one hell of a good party, though I do say it myself. And they had given it to us, just as much, if not more so. That, and not a quiet river bank, with the two of us isolated from the rest of the world, is where we could find security, relief, and peace.
A Continuity of Communion I’ve been listening to some
podcasts about music lately, specifically how to approach sacred music in modernity (thank you,
Paul Jernberg!). In one of these, Jernberg enumerates three things that need to be present for this music to work: a sense of preservation of the past, a sensibility for how to facilitate participation in the liturgy, and an energized desire to fuel organic growth and continuity. Preservation, participation, and continuity. And then, he goes on to a brief discussion of the contemporary prevalence of secular humanism, which in turn has three elements that create an uphill struggle in this musical endeavor: a disregard of history as outdated, stuffy and irrelevant (Jernberg quotes Henry Ford: “History is more or less bunk”); the idea that we humans can each solve our own problems with enough empirical knowledge and grit; and, finally, the increasing tendency to put ourselves first. So, I’ve been thinking about these three elements of humanism and how they’ve manifested in my own life (egocentric, much?). And, I’ve also been thinking about how they apply in this “unprecedented” era of COVID.
I suspect that anyone who knows me would agree that I don’t disregard old-fashioned, traditional things. Perhaps too much the reverse. But, what about the second idea, that of self-reliance, which sets itself up in opposition to a participation that engenders community? So much pride in the “self-made” accomplishments of my youth! I hope I am not too generous in forgiving my own faults when I suggest that it is a common mistake of youth to think that we have made ourselves by ourselves. (That is the central tragedy of James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whether Joyce knows it or not.) For one reason or another, I realized lately how much I owe of who I am now to the choices that my parents made when they were in their 20’s and 30’s, so much so that I had them over for dinner for the express purpose of telling them how grateful I am for the multitude of hardships that they took on, and gambles that they made, to get my siblings and me to where we all are today. If I learned to seek out beauty, it was because they showed it to me. If I learned how to work hard, and to sometimes practice discipline, it was because they taught me the paradigms, and eventually the reasons behind them. They handed it all down to me, which, incidentally, for all you Latin etymologists out there, is exactly what
tradition means:
tradere, to hand over.
As for the egocentrism, naturally this goes hand-in-hand with the idea of self-reliance. If I can figure everything out on my own, then life only needs to be about me, and I only need to look out for me. But, if other people have modeled and taught me what I know and how to share what I have, then I have a duty to be generous in returning that gift to them to the extent that I can—and to pass it down to the next generation, precisely to and beyond the point that the gift requires me to decrease, that they may increase.
When I think back on the continuity of this communion, that is, on traditions of sharing, giving, taking and supporting, physically and spiritually, I think about the generations who came before us, and what trials they might have had to endure and support each other through. Because, the fact of the matter is, history and traditions are not “bunk,” but rather the defining fabric of our own persons and society. With that understood, let’s look back a little ways.
Precedented 2008 was a pretty rotten year for a lot of us, myself included. All my hard work, and there I was, getting ready to graduate college, with a pocket full of debts and zero job prospects, as our economy was nose-diving into the worst slump in almost a century. How about 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis? Or the 1950s, which brought the “duck and cover” drills, that were supposed to protect you in case a nuclear bomb fell? Or the 1930s and 1940s, which brought rations and world-wide death and fear? Or the 1910s and 1920s, which brought the first World War, the Spanish Flu devastation, and eventually the Great Depression? What about the Middle Ages, and the multiple rounds of bubonic plague, and an average life expectancy of 33? What about the Dark Ages, that followed on the fall of the Roman Empire? When I think back on all of these things, and then think about the past year, and occasionally using a Kleenex instead of toilet paper on my nice white toilet with my indoor plumbing, occasionally washing my hands with a different kind of soap at my sink with hot running water, because the store was out of toilet paper and my normal kind of soap, and then think on how about as many people die of heart attacks each year in our country as the number of people who have died of COVID in this year since it all started, I start to realize that these times are not so unprecedented after all. It’s simply one more round, in one generation after another, following on millennia of people getting sick and dying, trying to make ends meet (2 weeks ago, Jamey started his fifth temporary job since March 2020), and figuring out how to help each other through it. Namely, one more generation of the human condition.
Except, lucky us, now we have humanism, which means we’re supposed to do it all on our own. That is what is unprecendeted. When the going gets tough, and we’ve decimated our communities by living in a way that makes us believe that they are superfluous, we are, on one level or another, forced to come to an unprecendented realization: though we need each other, we have pockmarked the social fabric that gives us the paradigm in which to practice that give and take, that communion.
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| Communion comes with a hefty tradition of importance during times of trouble. The Black Death killed about 30 percent of the world’s population (COVID has killed about .01 percent); that Black Death percentage went up to almost 50 percent among priests. They prioritized Communion in their care for the sick. (Illustration by Michale Welply in Die Pest, Geißel der Menschheit, 2006.) |
Giving is going to hurt. Any parent can tell you that. But it’s also the
sine qua non of humanity. Even in those dusty Middle Ages, with bubonic plague raging, they knew that. We owe it, not by any means just to ourselves, but especially to our friends, parents, siblings, cousins, co-workers, and
especially to our children, to remember that the physical gift of self is a non-negotiable element of full humanity. We have bodies; we should use them. He did; He still does.
