smatterings

small thoughts at the beginning of Holy Week, & books and music

I’ve become devoted to The Pitt; I think everyone should watch it. I watch it and think about the now-nearly-cliched advice from Mr. Rogers to “look for the helpers” when something frightening is happening. Here they are in the emergency room, the helpers, and they are hyper-competent and it’s a pleasure to see. They are burned-out and spiraling, too.

It was in Kate Braestrup’s memoir about chaplaining search-and-rescue operations in the Maine woods that I first encountered the instruction to look for the helpers. I don’t have the book at hand, but what I remember is that a tragedy had occurred, and someone asked her “Where is God in this?” She said look for the helpers: that’s where God is.

I think about this as I watch The Pitt. The helpers are all wounded by the secondary trauma of their work. I think about this when I read the news out of my local, understaffed hospital: nurses talk about the moral injury of working in such an environment, working as hard as they can yet never able to care for patients as quickly or as effectively as they need. I know the pain of impotence or partial impotence in the face of suffering, but I can’t imagine being face to face with it on a daily basis, working for good within a system that often feels orchestrated to work against you.

I used to think that looking for the helpers in terrifying or tragic moments meant I would see that the love of God is present in skilled hands willing to work on behalf of others, fixing things with a suture, comforting with a casserole. (And I do.) But as I watch The Pitt I think that looking for the helpers as a way of finding God in a tragedy also means recognizing that God is willing to be wounded with us, carrying (at least) the secondary trauma of accompanying us through loss and grief. God has skilled and scarred hands from helping. And so will we.

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Yes, I bought baby chicks again (the story of the first time is in the final chapter of Where Goodness Still Grows). No, this doesn’t have anything to do with my firstborn visiting colleges, rude of you to ask.

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Listen to Culcitology (Quilts!) on the Ologies podcast for the lore of sewing bees and political activism and Gee’s Bend turning the art world on its head, as well as practical tips for quilting and quilt care.

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Rebecca Solnit in the New York Times: “There’s all this disparagement about wine moms… Those of us who are making a racket, we’re often coded female as in hysterical overwrought need to calm down, no big deal, et cetera… but a huge amount of important work …is done by nice ladies.

I think a lot of people with platforms and a lot of the left want social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. But too many people still expect it to look like war.”

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I’m not a birder; my midlife hobbies have tended more towards plants and quilts. But even so I find Ragan Sutterfield’s new book Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice to be wise and beautiful. In fact, I did after listening to him read from it buy a few more birding books to leave in the screened in porch with the binocular, and downloaded Merlin, so maybe birding will be my late-middle-age move. (If you’re local, I have extra copies of Ragan’s book…)

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In other book news, I kind of hated Richard Powers’s latest, Playground, even though I was quite taken with The Overstory and Bewilderment. Or maybe what I hate is the way it’s marketed, as immersing readers in a boundless sense of the wonders of the ocean. What it is, and what I’m not sure anyone (including Powers?) knows, is that it’s a tragedy, and the narrator is not a hero but a villain, and a pathetic one. The reason I’m not sure Powers knows this about his own work? There are too many places where “the boundary between creation and destruction” is porous, where “the wreckage of war” seeds “the greatest nursery” ever seen. It’s as if Powers is trying to make an argument that the hubris and greed of tech bros won’t ultimately matter, as long as they’re creating something, as long as we all keep “playing,” it will all work out alright. When in fact it all ends in (not to give the ending away) an increasingly solipsistic delusion of a fake heaven.

Maybe I just never want to read about a tech billionaire ever again.

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I listened to two divorce memoirs: Jen Hatmaker’s Awake and Belle Burden’s Strangers, and all I want to say about them is that the ways the conservative evangelical church constricts and weakens women and the ways institutional wealth in the USA can constrict and weaken women are remarkably similar.

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What I’ve been listening to while writing this: the new album from Jose Gonzales. Also on regular rotation: Hurts Like Hell by Charlotte Cornfield (for fans ofWaxahatchee, SG Goodman) and One Thing At a Time by Courtney Barnett. Also: just the audio of Michael Card’s grandfather preaching at the beginning of this track; Choosin’ Texas by Ella Langley; and Evidence byTaylor Leonhardt.

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What I’ve been listening to while I sew: Johnny Cash reading the gospel of John.

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What I’m sewing: the Homespun Collective quilt, designed by a local quilter. Will I ever learn precision? Feels unlikely. So I am also sewing the irregular linen samples that came my with Ukranian linen clergy shirts into something irregular, maybe a curtain for a tiny window in my bedroom.

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Two Easter poems:

Carmen paschale
by Sedulius Scottus(840 CE), trans. Helen Waddell

Last night did Christ the Sun rise from the dark,
The mystic harvest of the fields of God,
And now the little wandering tribes of bees
Are brawling in the scarlet flowers abroad.
The winds are soft with birdsong; all night long
Darkling the nightingale her descant told,
And now inside church doors the happy folk
The Alleluia chant a hundredfold.
O Father of thy folk, be thine by right
The Easter joy, the threshold of the light.

Easter
by Marie Howe

Two of the fingers on his right hand
had been broken

so when he poured back into that hand it surprised
him — it hurt him at first.

And the whole body was too small. Imagine
the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill.

He came into it two ways:
From the outside, as we step into a pair of pants.

And from the center — suddenly all at once.
Then he felt himself awake in the dark alone.

If you’re local, save the date: Marie Howe will be at Trinity reading poems and in conversation about prayer and poetry on Thursday, May 7 at 7pm.

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