Interior Diaries
I’m sharing notes from my journal as we walk through the COVID-19 crisis and plan to update this post often. —SB
April 24, 2020
I almost didn’t want to check, but I’ve completed 14 online meetings so far this week. For work, a church meeting, spiritual direction, a prayer group. I’ve used that one app (I can’t remember its name: Ping Pong, Jig Saw—oh wait!—Marco Polo) to talk to friends daily. ⠀
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Screens are all we have to connect, it’s the best we can do. But like so many of us, I want to see real human faces and not assume nuance. ⠀
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Healing itself is so visceral: Jesus made mud by mixing his spit with dirt and smeared the paste over a blind man’s eyes. Mary broke the perfume balm over Jesus’s feet. She dried her tears over his feet with her hair.
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We long to see that kind of healing, to bear witness to God restoring the people we love, the cities where we live. We long for a cure, a vaccine. For restoration.⠀
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The Bible is always talking about feasts: Jesus eating with a tax collector. Water to wine at the wedding. The Last Supper. The great feast on the Holy Mountain. ⠀
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We want to eat dinner, with other people, at the same actual table. ⠀
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But until then, pray Psalm 27:13 with me in full hope that we will pray for each other in person and eat together again. “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”⠀
April 16, 2020
“I hate this so much”, “this is so stupid”, “this will never end”—real things I’ve said in the past week about Covid. The pandemic is a pinball banging on different parts of our emotions.
“Trials are the food of faith,” we read in Streams in the Desert, Lettie Cowman’s devotional from 1925. Also: faith is not tethered to feeling or circumstance. Lord, we pray with saints from the ages: increase our faith. Let out faith be firm regardless of feelings and very dark days.
Maybe our memories of Covid will be spaghetti thrown at the wall, mostly undone but with some things finished. Maybe the pandemic will feel like a crazy dream, with a certain slant or angle you can’t explain when you wake up, but that stays with you.
Maybe a song will remind us of this disorienting time, a movie, something in culture. For some of us, the turn of the season. For others, a verse. For me, there’s this one in Romans 5: "because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame."
April 13, 2020
I’ve don’t remember how many days or weeks we’ve been at home. Instead of the calendar, I seem to best track the changes in Covid by headline trends. In the first weeks there was news coverage centered on the build and spread. Then equity and access. Next its rural reach, the virus coming to less populated places. Over Easter weekend, the headlines moved into a past tense, even if there is a lot more suffering ahead. More content these days seems to think forward — how will we reopen the country. What businesses will remain. When will we travel.
My heart is not beating in the same cadence as the news. I am at the beginning of Covid some days, some days I have the gift of being outside of it in my mind, some days I’m stricken with fresh grief. I’ve been praying for firmer footing, for the strong arm of Christ to ground us.
What if the thing many of us have been searching for in these weeks — the grip of control and predictability we want in times of uncertainty — doesn’t actually have much to offer our interior states of being? I don’t know how long it will last, but have less of a need to know. I’m not getting much done besides what’s required, and have less need to do. I’m longing for a cure and for healing for many and will continue to long. A day at a time, sometimes an hour at a time.
April 10, 2020
Remember that scene in Christmas Vacation when Chevy Chase carves the turkey at the family’s holiday meal? It looks magazine perfect from the outside, but when he cuts in it explodes open, gray and dry innards that steam and collapse.
If you cut me open, I wonder what you would find. I had an image of a fish the other day, and thought that if God plunged his hand in my stomach he would pull out a fist full of rainbow slick fish. I then thought of the tree in the backyard of my childhood home. One day as a young child I approached and saw three small fish drying in a row at its base. It felt ominous — who put them there, and what message were they sending? There were three people in our family. But this image of God pulling fish out of my stomach, what could it mean?
I had another visual thought this morning. What if you cut me open and found seeded fruit with dark green leaves? A forest of fleshy fruit for the taking.
Jesus, with the wounded side at the crucifixion. What did it feel like when Thomas pressed his finger there, after Jesus left the tomb? Could Thomas see the inside of the resurrected body? Was there red or spacious light?
April 7, 2020
It’s Semana Santa. Holy Week. People celebrate for days in Spanish-speaking countries: Parades, parties and horse shows in Nicaragua where Drew usually travels to visit coffee farmers and mills this time of year. Madrid’s annual Procession of Silence in San Luis Potosi would have happened on Wednesday, when purple hooded, barefoot pallbearers carry a coffin with a crucified Jesus statue on top, his feet skimming red flowers.
Most of these Holy Week traditions and rituals have been cancelled because of Covid. But here is a Samana Santa of the mind: incense balls swinging, drums playing, the grand approach. The crowd moving from defeated—a wrapped and buried Christ—to an empty grave. The way our hearts would catch and burn, to see the risen Jesus. To watch Thomas put his fingers through the wounded hand.
April 2, 2020
Coronavirus in Seattle: An endless snow day without the snow. It’s a blizzard, but we see blooms and green. The yard is coming alive in spite of it all, there is weeding and a lot of growing: A tray of tomato starts are sprouting for transfer to the raised beds.
On a map, Seattle is sandwiched between two mountain ranges. She’s heavy on her sides and slick in the middle. Veined streets, with water running down through her throat and stomach. The Cascades arc above her head, a lady with a fruit tiara. Sugared grapes, glass cherries, and beaded lemons stacked and spilling over so you can’t look away.
I read a verse this morning reminding us that the kingdom of God is here. It’s already among us. This pandemic, which has come so quick, contours and brightens God’s very love, made perfect in every trial and affliction. The Lord’s consolation brings release. It doesn’t smooth over or disappear afflictions, but breaks open a defiant gladness. We move in Christ from desolation to luscious fig tree groves of the mind. I think of Romans 8:
Height nor depth. Present nor future. Death nor life
Nothing at all. Not a single thing
Not covid, not cancer. Not income, not lack of income
Can separate us from God’s love in Christ.
March 31, 2020
To comfort: Red sauce classics. We’ve had meatball subs and pork parm this week, and it’s only Tuesday. Also: Seattle’s 70s and 80s station on our little portable radio. “Jesse’s Girl”, “Time After Time”. Some songs are a little too close to the bone: “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”, or worse, “Stayin’ Alive”. I think of my cousin sunbathing on the concrete slabbed back patio of the Indiana ranch I grew up in. Baby oil next to a beach towel, WMEE playing these same songs. Corn on the cob with butter and salt. A half a watermelon and a single spoon. The slip and slide.
My mind goes to these places, instead of to the places I can’t process. Here are two:
The magnitude of the virus. Today at the White House news briefing, there was a grim prediction that between 100,000 and 240,000 lives will be lost to Covid. 2,977 people died during the 9/11 attacks. That number, more than a hundred thousand beautiful people with fleshy bodies, beating hearts, and people who love them, are predicted to perish. It is unthinkable, and I snap back to the radio. “99 Red Balloons”, then “Don’t Stop Believing”.
Its open-endedness. It’s easier to bear grief and navigate fear when there is a completion date. We think a day at a time now, maybe a week. But who can stomach months, or God forbid a burn off of the virus in the summer and return in the fall? What small food or creative business could handle that weight, what nonprofit can keep its virtual doors open? What working parent can bear teaching children with no steady source income?
The best place I can put my mind, right here and now, is to repeat that Kyrie Eleison. Lord have mercy on us. Christ have mercy on us. Lord have mercy on us.
March 26, 2020
I drove to Sea Wolf yesterday morning, to their little outdoor bread stand. Bought a loaf of hearty rye sourdough, a dense, foot-long rectangle that tastes better than anything with soft butter and sea salt. I took the side streets there and not the highway, and I think it helped me process a little bit of what Seattle is like now. The ice cream shop was doing take out but decided it was safest for its employees to fully close shop. The place the kids used to get music lessons was dark.
I oscillate between feelings of grief about Covid itself, and about the was it has destroyed the economy, the businesses of so many friends and acquaintances. There are two buckets in my mind, the illness and the business.
On the illness: My friend, a nurse, held the hand of a man as he died of Covid in the hospital last night. “I’ve never seen someone die, never actually watched it happen,” Drew said in bed this morning, thinking of our beautiful, brave friend. “Neither have I.”
On the business: A local beloved coffee shop with a community-minded owner served first responders yesterday, two trays of coffee and cookies. She has had to drastically cut hours, walk-in business has more than dipped. We’ve buying as much lemon poppyseed loaf as we can, but what happens in the weeks and months ahead?
Any of us can enter their own version of illness/business stories, many of us first-hand. I read a helpful interview in Harvard Business Review with grief expert David Kessler. He names the feelings many of us are having during Covid as grief indeed, in many cases a kind of anticipatory grief that hinges on uncertainty. People normally feel it in their own minds, a fear of death or an unknown future. We’re experiencing it together, a kind of worldwide grieving of what could be and who and what we might lose along the way. He says:
There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.
Kessler also offers a final stage of grief: meaning.
If I’m honest, I’ve never found a lot of comfort when Jesus says in the Beatitudes: “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.” It hadn’t seemed possible, to not worry about growing worries, worries that do not dissipate after a day. The incurable, the chronic.
But I’m for the first time realizing that Jesus knew full well that worries often do not cease and that trouble often builds. And he was defiant in a call to live fully in spite of what’s ahead—that nothing is added when we ruminate, but that the work of acceptance and purpose happen best right where we are.
March 23, 2020
I listened to a Mark Sayers sermon yesterday from his church Melbourne. He mirrored our time of crisis in this pandemic to when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. The Israelites left one-square-meal-a-day slavery to no meals, no water … but the chance to be close to God. The rock was struck, water came out in front of their very eyes. Bread floated down like snow. Sayers paralleled that time to now. We lose security and the grip on our current culture. Instead, we gain uncertainty, but have a chance to see God move in powerful ways. I love this invitation, to fully move into uncertain futures, especially when they are uncomfortable.
I also listened to an On Being originally recorded in 2016 with the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. She’s explored ideas around the goodness of humanity after disasters. How we’re able to tangibly live in the present in crisis. How, in contrast to blockbuster movie depictions of people reeling after loss, people step up. Post 1989 SF earthquake, post Hurricane Katrina. At one point Solnit contrasts uncertainty with its polar opposite, hope.
I think of Hebrews 11: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for. It is being certain of what we do not see.” I’d been doing work around accepting uncertainty in my life, pre-Covid. Again, an invitation to accept the uncertainty of our world right now, and to choose to hope.
It’s a collective chance to feel the uncomfortable feeling of not being in control, and to feel it together. And for those of us that identify as Christians, this emotional and practical posture leaves plenty of room for God’s spirit to change our hearts and the hearts of people we love.
March 20, 2020
We came up in a church that believed God could empower anyone to do anything. Drew baptized our friend Lezlie in the White River, and of course it counted. We’d take communion with grape juice from Aldi and a crusty baguette back then. Our friend Pat would say, “this is Christ’s body. Take a big piece.” The spirit is everywhere, and the spirit was in the cheap stuff. Its cheapness, its lack of procedure, felt big and free. John the Baptist wild.
But now I see the beauty of the other side. Watching our Presbyterian pastor bless the sacraments, saying the Sursum Corda together and marching in a heartbreak procession to the front. Being looked at in the eye and told, “The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.” When the wine burns down the throat, it is mysterious and embodied.
In this new normal, there doesn’t seem to be a right solution for communion. It’s on our minds as we try to figure out virtual church with other leaders in our local congregation. One idea: our pastor could set up a drive-thru communion stand in the church parking lot on Easter Sunday. The cup and cracker instead of a big gulp and burger. I love it, but don’t know if we can pull it off, since we could be sheltering in place any day now.
March 19, 2020
You need milk, not solid food, Paul tells the Corinthians. In the King James, the verse is translated: “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat.”
Milk is not bad, it’s basic. It’s the opposite of acidic. Breast milk is complex and fortifies. Sometimes, we need to go back to simple things, spiritual vitamins and minerals. Especially in times of corporate anxiety.
We’re headed for the land of milk and honey. The land where suffering poofs away: a baby powder cloud from clapping hands.
When you look at it through a certain beam of sunlight, air is filled with floating specks of dust. Discovering this as a kid, I imagined that each speck had a flavor. Lemonade on my tongue. Toasted coconut. Chocolate milk.
Today, we think about breathing in virus droplets from a cough or sneeze. Touching a surface that someone who is sick touched and smearing it on our phones or faces without thinking.
Jesus was not afraid to touch the sick. I read this morning of Jesus healing a person with leprosy. Can you imagine it, if you were there? Seeing his skin heal. Would it have been lightening fast? Would you have believed your own eyes?