Time moves in a strange way right now. Sometimes, it feels like minutes take forever to inch by, and at others, hours seem to fly past me at speeds faster than lightning. When I left Austin in mid-March, an uncharacteristically last-minute decision to begin with, I had no idea that I would still be in Orange County six weeks later. So much has changed during those six weeks. I feel like my body is trying to catch up with the impact of all those changes swirling around us.
A former coworker of mine shared with the rest of us on staff at St. Augustine at the time her sense that the rhythms of the liturgical year sometimes don’t line up with where we are in real time, but the moods that mark seasons like Advent and Lent and Ordinary Time do map on to the seasons of our lives, regardless of how long or how short they might be. While I’m very much aware that we are in the season of Easter and that Pentecost is still a couple weeks off, parts of me have remained back in Lent. The spiritual practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving we explore during this liturgical season feel real and rooting in a different way right now. Praying with my parents and my brother continues to be a source of consolation these days, and I’m beginning to place before God the grief I’m experiencing over how close the realities of illness and death now feel—too close, to be clear, like I can reach out and touch them, much too close for comfort.
Maybe it’s because my body is back in the suburbs where I grew up, maybe it’s something else, but unexpectedly spending quarantine in my childhood home has prompted all kinds of reflection on US American culture and the tiny little corners of it I’ve been able to occupy.
The high school my siblings and I attended was on the other end of Bristol from South Coast Plaza, a monument to capitalism that expanded to include Crystal Court around the time I was starting first grade. Students in their first year were called “freshmen” at our high school then. All of us were, regardless of gender. This was a time when I only knew two options for gender had ever existed anywhere, and I had not yet heard the term “exclusive language,” even if the practice of referring to ourselves as men during Mass rankled me. It bothered me then that the tuition was so expensive at our high school that the families of the high school-aged teenagers who lived in the neighborhood often couldn’t afford to pay it in full, available as scholarships were. We knew who “the scholarships kids” were; they worked at the snack bar during lunch and after school, pouring their classmates’ sodas and making change at the cash register.
By the time I had started college, I had come to understand that I had grown up in the geographic and socioeconomic midpoint between South Los Angeles and South Orange County. My family did not struggle financially the way so many did up the freeway from us, nor was it true that we were so very wealthy that we never wanted for anything, as was the case for many of my high school classmates who lived walking distance from the water, about as many miles south. My mom was good at reminding us by her example that we had a responsibility to those who have less, and the couple who ran the Catholic Worker where I spent a summer in college shared with me that it can be helpful to remind wealthy Catholics where they can put their extra money to use.
As grounded as my parents kept us, I came of age in the Southern California of the 1990s, where opulent wealth coexisted alongside the kind of economic poverty that has the potential to break one’s spirit. Whether my vantage point was the backyard of the Catholic Worker house in Santa Ana or the bluff at Loyola Marymount, it became clearer and clearer to me while I was in college that the county I called home suffered from a form of addiction we didn’t cover in my biology course on Human Drug Use sophomore year. I grew up in an environment full of people who were constantly hungry to acquire more and more and more and more, a hunger that would not be satiated by the next purchase. No matter how many boxes from Costco a soccer mom could stuff into her minivan, no matter the number of BMWs a family could collect in their garages, no matter how much square footage a family could afford for their McMansion overlooking the ocean, it would never actually be enough.
To be clear, I’m not immune to this addiction. While I’ve never been one to go on shopping sprees at South Coast, I struggle to honor the commitment to simple living with which I began to experiment during that summer I spent as a member of the Catholic Worker community in Santa Ana. It’s nice to have nice things. If we have enough of them, it becomes easier for us to trick ourselves into believing that those nice things can buffer us from the hard things that are unpreventable, especially for so many of our siblings in the Christ who knew suffering and who also rises.
But the lifestyles others of us in the US enjoy are not sustainable, especially for everyone the world over. Never has this been more the case than it was before the stock market crashed this spring. Yes, the economic reality of the top 1% is one that only a very privileged few in the US enjoy. But even so, the choices many Americans had been privileged to make about money before the spread of the coronavirus were the stuff of dreams for the vast majority of our neighbors in the global south. As my HTI colleague Jorge Juan Busone Rodríguez V illustrates so clearly in his recent Open Plaza piece, we are living through a time of apocalypse, a time of great unveiling. No longer is the suffering of so many obscured from view for those who are economically comfortable. We can’t not see it. As the numbers of those who are infected with Covid19 and those who have died from it in economically poor communities of color in the United States in cities like St. Louis continue to rise, none of us can deny the impact of the lack of consistently available and affordable public insurance on our neighbors. As gentrification continues, poor Black and Brown folks may not be able to afford to live near those of us who experience economic and racial privilege any longer, but they have not disappeared. In cities like Austin, ethnic enclaves that used to exist on the East Side and the South Side are, in fact, disappearing, but their former residents are being priced out of the city proper to places like Round Rock, where middle-class people of color can afford a home for their families, or Bastrop, which is becoming home to a growing number of economically poor newcomers to the United States.
My parents and I were talking about these things as we sat in the tall chairs arranged around the island in the middle of their kitchen after breakfast last week. My mom recounted the burning of the Amazon last fall, the political upheaval in Bolivia last winter and into the new year, and the advent of a new pandemic this spring. I really believe God is allowing this to happen, she said, so we can remember how to take care each other. She and Teresa of Calcutta are right. Many of us have forgotten what is true: We belong to one another. As the news of the numbers of the dying in the US are beamed into our living rooms each night, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when this virus begins to afflict our neighbors in the global south. That morning at the table, my mom described God as pushing pause on business as usual, sharing her hope that we will not only take better care of one another in our families on the other side of this, but that we would also remember how to care for our siblings in what my students preparing for priesthood in the Episcopal Church often call the whole human family.
Let’s use our prayer time to remember our interconnectedness and our interdependence, now. If we don’t need to use our stimulus checks to meet our immediate needs, let’s share those alms with those who do. And let’s develop some small experiments that help us begin to fast from our addiction to those things we might want but don’t actually need. Let’s imagine together what our world could be like on the other side of the pandemic, even as we struggle to embrace the humility we need to practice, in order to admit that none of us really knows when that will be. What might it be like for us simply to be in the in-between-ness of this time? To dream about the world as it could be? To start now with the kinds of small experiments that might bring us thismuch closer to that world becoming a part of our lived reality?
