We are futural creatures. We’re used to making sense of our lives by memory, but if we didn’t know it already this pandemic has revealed how much we make sense of them in anticipation. We live for the person we hope to become. We look forward to who we will be some time from now and we landmark the transitions with rites and ceremonies celebrated in public co-located with loved ones and friends.
I just learned the word co-located via the virtual commencement we connected to Thursday morning with our son Gabriel. Had it not been for the pandemic, he, Victoria, and I would be vacationing in Janice Dalzell-Piper’s beautiful Ireland now, having hopped a red-eye Thursday night after a luncheon for Baker Scholars and their parents and commencement ceremonies all day at Harvard Business School. That luncheon and the rest of it would have been an occasion to recognize his accomplishment and to thank his mentors. To lose it was disappointing, for Gabriel, for Victoria, and fer sher for me!
I think of other parents in the parish whose children are graduating from schools. Notre Dame—Victoria went to graduate school there, my son-in-law is a doctoral student there and one of our high school students, Sam Abbott, will be a freshman this fall—announced the other day that it’s going to start school two weeks early and end the fall term at Thanksgiving break. Other students, entering or returning in schools all over the country, are still wondering whether in-class courses will be offered or not. If your children can’t be on campus this fall, are they going to take a gap year or defer, or not? What’s that going to look like? Who are they going to be if they can’t be where they’re supposed to be?
Pandemic dislocation is hard. It’s hard on students. And I can tell you on good authority it’s hard on parents. All of us with children in school were looking forward to parading through all these rites of passage with our students and now we’re unable to do that except virtually. And whether the ceremony is on the banks of the Charles River or on the island of Belvedere virtually is not the same as co-located. We’re not receiving the graduation, we’re not getting the college orientation or the first parents weekend or the special lunch. We’re not receiving the Sacrament by mouth where it belongs. (The Hebrew word nephesh which comes into English as ‘soul’ means throat.) It’s lamentable, life in exile. We live life bodily; we were made to; and now we seem disembodied.
Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States, having been provoked to war by Japan, made a moonscape of Yokohama with incendiary bombs. Uncle Sam had let my Tamaoki ancestors and everyone else in the city know that the bombing was coming in two weeks so please leave the city. They did, evacuating to the north. My mother’s most oft-repeated memory of that time in exile is of a Korean girl who befriended her in Hokkaido. A Japanese girl would take Akiko’s lunch from her every day, and a Korean girl would generously split hers with her. When my grandfather Yoshiharu came out of the bomb shelter in Yokohama it took him seven whole days to find his way home. The landmarks he would have depended on to find it were gone.
Rites and ceremonies, liturgies, are the landmarks by which we find our way to the person and the people, the community, we hope to be. The rites and ceremonies include everything from ‘Play Ball!’ to a luncheon to a cap and gown to turning a tassel to gathering at an altar in a sacred space.
Last Sunday in the sermon I said that the Bible, that wondrous and weird library of books, is looking a lot less strange in the time of pandemic. Most of the prayers in the Psalms are laments, and that’s in part because many of the people walking around in the Bible’s pages were living in exile. And we can relate to that now in a way that we couldn’t before this pandemic. We’re living in a forced exile. The prophet Isaiah wrote in exile. What does the Spirit of the Lord say to God’s people in exile? “Come to me, all you that are thirsty.” [Isa. 55. 1]
After Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC, residents of Judah were deported to Babylon where they were held captive for fifty-eight years. Psalm 40 was written in exile. Psalm 137 was also, a song that expresses the longing of the Jewish people during their Babylonian exile. We had no idea when we said in January that the word chosen for 2020 was ‘Longing’ what that would mean.
Psalm 137 is a nine-verse poem. Tradition attributes it to the prophet Jeremiah. In exile our ancestors in the faith lost their way of life. And what they missed above all was Jerusalem because that’s where the Temple was. They located themselves, were co-located, with the God who promised to be present to them there. How were they going to worship the Lord in a strange land?
That question has become our question. How do we worship the Lord in a strange land? So hear now what God said through Jeremiah the prophet, in Jeremiah 29, “This is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. And seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I’ve carried you into exile.’”
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for the peace of Babylon, the Lord says. Pray for Wuhan, Milan, London, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Belvedere. Seek the peace of the city to which I’ve carried you into exile.
There are a lot of false choices in life. We’re encountering two. I’ve heard some clergy say that the church is not a building, that the sacred space doesn’t matter. This implies that faith is merely what someone does with their solitude. What’s more, buildings have ministries. They matter as any architect knows. They are physical reminders of a vital dimension to life that modernity has tried to marginalize or show the door. Ours has such a ministry. It says, Keep Looking Up. And our Christus Rex says, Come To Me.
I’ve also heard other clergy saying that they and their congregations must be allowed back into their sacred spaces straightaway to worship the Lord. The problem here is that there are thoroughly comprehensible reasons for dislocation, however disturbing and devastating it is. And this is not the first time God’s people have been called to live faithfully in exile.
We are learning many things in this pandemic. And we are longing for the day when our buildings will function within our society as they were designed and consecrated to do.
In exile irony is everywhere. Psalm 137 is a song about being unable to sing a song. Exile forces upon us disciplines of sorrow. That’s the school in which we’re currently enrolled, the school of lament, lamenting that we can’t lament in the way that we want to. But we’re doing what the faithful in exile are called to do; we’re seeking the welfare of the city. We are settling down, to borrow Jeremiah’s language, into this strange regime seeking the welfare of the city where we are, the welfare of our neighbors. But we have no desire to remain in exile. We are not where we want to be, dislocated from our sacred spaces. We have not forgotten Jerusalem. And we long to return there.
—PCE+