We went to Massachusetts at the end of July for the first long trip since the pandemic started.
It was for a memorial for my wife’s mother who had died of Covid-19 in May 2020 at age 89.
She caught the disease in a New Jersey nursing home, and by the time she was admitted to a hospital there didn’t seem to be much they could do to help.
Arrangements were made to transport her remains to where her long time home had been in the Berkshires where she was interred with no one to witness, which seemed a great lack.
The church was unable to allow a memorial service until just now because the small group we invited, a few dozen family members and friends, could receive vaccines.
My wife and I spent four days there, two days around Boston where we flew in and the rest at the western end of the state a few hours away.
I have been attracted to religion from an early age, though I have lots of
friends and acquaintances who have no interest in it or have an active dislike
of it. Towards them I bear no ill will, though I understand that this blog post
is probably not going to be their kind of thing.
For Lent I listened to the audiobook
version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward as my assignment and it was an
experience of a contrary way of looking and doing things. Rohr is a Franciscan
priest who has written many books on spirituality. This book is one which
concentrates on the part of life where the things that we were taught for years
as children and as new adults first getting established in the world, the things
which have always been promoted as the underpinnings of society and the basis
of a good life, no longer address the things which matter when a person reaches
full maturity, the “second part of life.” After a certain point, the frenetic
activities of establishing a career, making a home for oneself, living in a new
family or in community or by oneself, can all start to feel less relevant. They
call novels about young people concerned with fitting into the world
Bildungsromans but as far as I know, there isn’t a term for a story about the
similar kind of struggle at the other end of life (books like Philip Roth’s
Everyman).
I look at what my own life after work will be like, at what it is to stay on
top of multiplying health concerns, and at the accumulation of stuff I own
and this observation of Rohr’s resonates with me. Of course we’ve heard about
this before, from many other thinkers, but Richard Rohr spotlighted the problem
in a way that seemed to grow out of a solid basis in philosophy.
Twice a year, during Advent and Lent, I try to do some spiritual reading as a discipline, and this Lent I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, generally accounted to be a masterpiece of contemplation. The idea is that the human soul is pictured as a transparent castle containing many rooms, sort of a diamond cloister, the most impregnable fortress against the dangers of the outside world. It was natural that this member of a cloistered order would write based upon something she knew, of course, but the interesting thing will be how much I can make of this idea living in the world. Is a transparent mansion a cosy place, shiny and pristine as it is, or is it more like a prison to the modern reader?
