As 2020 comes to a close, I’ve seen a number of friends trying their best to make sense of 2020, to put a little bit of shine on what has universally been a dim year. Well, this is my attempt to make what I can out of this year.
In truth, I don’t want to make sense out of this year. I, like you, just want it to be over. I remember conversations in seminary where we talked about situations and times so grim, there’s just no sense to be made out of the senselessness. The great spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, in his typical Augustinianism, called this world, “a demented inn.” This year, it’s felt especially more demented than usual. Our selfishness, our crassness, our short-sightedness has come unveiled at the cost of many lives and many livelihoods.
Still, Merton says, it is into this demented inn that God chose to dwell, to become flesh in a world for which there is no room for him. And so he belongs to those for whom there is no room in this world. Here are some of the ways in which I’ve seen the divine living in places and parts of my own life for which I had no room for it:
In 2020, I learned deep loss in ways I never wanted to. Every day I’ve awoken to the dreaded anxiety of worrying that I might get sick, that I might get someone else sick and that someone would die. I never thought I would get the call in the middle of the night that my grandmother had unexpectedly passed away of a heart attack. I never knew how much I would miss her, even her little calls on my voicemail to say, “Call your grandmother!” She was a bright light, a constant blip of joy, even when we had nothing to talk about.
Five months later, her brother, my great uncle passed. I sat with him two days before he passed. His heart, and therefore his body, were failing right before my very eyes. He didn’t recognize us. But I’ll never forget when he looked up at me, and arched his right eyebrow in a soft scowl, the very same look my grandmother had given me so many times. “I’ll see you again soon and I love you,” I said when I left him. I never saw him again.
While my dreaded fear hasn’t come true, it’s come true in other ways that I didn’t see coming. No one warned me of the strange feeling of growing old – that the people who you grew up with, who you thought would live forever, who would love your kids the way they loved you when you were a kid, who would start to come to your house for Christmas would start to disappear.
Our family seems so much smaller without them.
I learned to say, “I love you” and to show up on random Tuesdays for dinner with family. I took so much for granted. But now I call family members, I check on them. We FaceTime and Zoom with cousins and uncles and distant family members we haven’t seen for years. I try to keep tabs on them, just like Grandma did for us.
I learned that the best words to say in death are honest words. He was loved. She was a light. They sparked our childhoods with wild imagination, even if it was just sitting out in the front yard making bonfires out of trash in the steady Appalachian mountains, or exploring the wilds of an old farm down a long gravel road in LaGrange. We don’t know what happens. We release them back to the source of Life from which they came and to which they belong, always.
I learned that life is especially hardest when you think you’re doing it on your own. Covid made me feel more like a shut-in than ever before. I stayed away from family and friends and even my girlfriend at times, out of fear and out of love. Even though others took advantage of opportunities, I tried to keep my exposure opportunities to a minimum. And I felt so alone.
I learned to speak up when you feel alone. To talk with friends and family, even when they drive you nuts. To get buddies to work alongside of you with the hard stuff, even if you have to pay for them (I’m talking about training and therapy, not pay-for-friends schemes).
I learned that change is the hardest thing we have to do. I might have never tried to change anything about my life if it weren’t for Covid. In fact, I think for years I’ve been trying my hardest not to change anything.
I learned it is up to you to change. You will celebrate your successes all the more when you take that first brave step, when you complete that first month, when you give up that one thing. I don’t mean this in some “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” kind of way. You seek help, you get advice, you get guidance. But it’s up to you to go to the gym every day, or type that letter, or make time for something you care about.
I learned again that we’re not alone. We make meaning together. We need each other.
I learned that you have to get creative sometimes to live out your passion. You have to make time and sacrifices sometimes to live it out. I’m grateful to those who have listened to my crazy ideas and my complaints and my ramblings about what could be, what should be, who I might be. They thought they were just listening to crazy Chris rattle off weird ideas. But really it was the stuff of passion.
I tried some of those. For the first time in awhile, I stuck with them. I learned new hobbies. I started barbecue. I don’t know what it was that got me hooked on it; I blame my pitmaster friend. But I wanted to barbecue. And I learned all the things that creative people know intuitively. I learned and I read and I watched. But I wasn’t going to actually learn anything until I tried. So I tried. And I failed and I failed and I failed. I also learned. I committed. I tried to make things better.
Strangely, it was barbecue that helped me try for harder things and to fail worse…and still know I was getting better for it. I started jumping into deeper waters and in much bigger pools. Becoming less afraid to try bold things. Knowing that the most likely outcome was failure but that in the rare instances I found success – oh, how it was worth all the failing!
I learned that I am an embodied creature. I have a body. It is an amazing, living thing that creates and moves and overcomes in ways that baffle the universe. It has carried me so far and still it keeps growing and changing and surviving.
I want to say that I learned to love my body – to accept its “faults” or “imperfections” – and come to a better contentment of living in it. That’s not true, yet. But it is something I am working towards. And it is also a journey I don’t think I would have ever even started if Covid didn’t compel me, painfully and wonderfully, to confront it.
So that’s where I’ve been trying to make room for the Divine to dwell here with me. In this sometimes more, sometimes less demented inn in which we all have the blessed and terrifying opportunity to pass through. This year is not a journey I would ever want to make again. Still, in some ways, there are monsters I never would have faced, wonders I never would have discovered and beauty I never would have beheld were it not for Covid.
I guess I am trying to put my own shine on the year after all. Oh well. As Doctorow said, “It’s like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little ways ahead of you but you can make the whole journey that way.”
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