Something I think

 A thought, this morning: 

I play a Pandora classical station in my office to drown out hall noise and keep me focused. Over time it's experienced a bit of "genetic drift" from the Mozart and JS Bach I originally seeded it with (or maybe "random walk" is a more appropriate metaphor) and it now includes some vocal choral sacred music, and also some large-pipe-organ renditions of well-known hymns.

Today it played "Hosanna, Loud Hosanna," which I know as The Palm Sunday Hymn (this was purely an instrumental version but I sing the words in my head when I hear it.

And it struck me, how odd it is, how surpassingly odd, to live through the slow stately round of liturgical time simultaneously with everything in the world that's happening too loud and too fast. I mean maybe the grounding of liturgical time, of remembering Now It Is Lent, Soon It Will Be Easter helps me hang on to the few marbles that remain to me, but it's still odd to contemplate.

Like probably some other folks, I spent part of last evening - after getting home from AAUW meeting - glued to the news of "they're bombing a nuclear power plant, God save us" and while it turned out in the end not to be as BAD as we had feared it would be*

(*I joked on twitter: "Say a prayer for everyone you know old enough to remember Chernobyl; we aren't having a good evening" and that was true. I vividly remember that disaster; I was a junior in high school, I remember we talked about it with kind of a sick and horrified wonder, and that was just plain old bad design, corruption, and bad luck, without the actual evil of war. And actually: having a father who had researched uranium and worried a bit about radiation probably wasn't good; I remember we didn't buy milk for some weeks after that out of concern of contamination. Now, as a sad old adult, I realize that most of the milk even in the 1980s would have come from the battery-hen version of cows, who probably rarely saw the outdoors. I do think a lot of my dad's anxiety about nuclear war filtered down to me, I realize that now)

But yes. It's weird. I guess there's some kind of chronos-vs-kairos thing going on here*. Right now I prefer kairos; I prefer even the self-reflection and penance of Lent to whatever is going on out in the wider world, and I look forward to the celebration of Palm Sunday (even if, really, the people were wrong about what was going to happen; they were expecting a military king who would kick the Romans out and establish a New Davidic Kingdom) and Easter. And looking forward to the semester being done and maybe getting to go see my mom again in May, and maybe even looking forward to not wearing a mask to teach this fall? (though the past two times I've said that, a bad new variant cropped up)

(*Funny - driving home from the yarn shop last week I drove past a food-truck area, and there was one labeled "Kairos Tacos" and I asked myself, does that mean you get them in God's own time?)

I don't know. It's strange and weird being a person of faith and yet a person who has doubts and questions AND is an anxious person in these times. I mean, I was just musing while working out this morning: well, the world's likely to end SOME time, but would the Divine Being really make us all suffer through a horrific, protracted pandemic and THEN war and THEN wink us out in a nuclear explosion? That seems all so very unnecessary. (The whole concept of the "Tribulation," which I think is an extra-Biblical thing, or at least a stretch of the imagery in Revelation, always hit a little wrong with me: we're out here trying our best. Most of us are not actively evil but are more selfish or lazy or whatever, do we really need that level of punishment to "purify" us in time for Heaven? I don't know)

I probably haven't been outside enough lately. Today walking in to my office from the car I realized it was warm out, and the sun was shining, and I found myself thinking: I would like to just find a hillside and go lie down on it for a while. Never mind that fire ants are a major problem here, and there are other bugs and such, and I have things to do, so that's not possible. But the desire was there.