Grace in the Time of Covid: On a cold winter's morning, a lesson from Michael

 It was a bone-chilling cold, pre-dawn Tuesday morning. The 5 a.m. alarm on my phone sounded, and for several minutes -- nestled in my warm bed -- and debated with just turning it off and drifting back to sleep.

But I got up, with a moan. It was the day for early-morning liturgy and communion at Sts. Peter & Paul Orthodox Church in downtown Salt Lake City. I knew I needed it, and needed to be there. 

After the service, the guys would meet for coffee and scriptural study with Fr. Paul downstairs -- a time that has become especially precious to me during this season of prolonged Covid-19 related isolation.

Showered and dressed, I donned a heavy coat, scarf and gloves and bundled myself into the car, first scraping a sheet of ice from the windshield. My decades-old Honda Civic coughed to life, I turned on the heater full blast, and drove down the road.

It's a 15-minute trip to the church, and to my usual morning prayers and added not a few laments about life as we have come to know it in the age of pandemic. Finally, as I drove on near-empty, slippery streets, I passed the homeless camps of shopping carts draped with makeshift tents that regularly pop up along the curbs of the Salt Lake County-City Government Complex.

Deseret News photo

But I was so self-absorbed, irritated that the old Honda's heater was just beginning to warm the car's interior, that I hardly noticed the desperation and poverty of wrecked lives that have become part of the urban landscape.

Pulling into a dark side street and then the small parking lot behind my parish church, I sat for a time behind the wheel, relishing a belated moment of warmth. Then with a grunt I got out, put on my mask, shivered, and began walking down the alley to the entrance of Sts. Peter & Paul.

The homeless, I'm ashamed to say, have too often become the faceless, nameless backdrops of our lives today. If not ignored, then they only elicit a brief thought or an occasional a few bucks quickly handed over to appease the inconvenience of guilt.

But there is one denizen of the street many in the parish have come to know, and some befriend.

"Michael," also the name of his patron saint, adorns the sleeves of his arms and coat with iconic images of saints and angels, secured with transparent plastic and duct tape. Slight and gaunt, his beard and graying hair often seeming as wild and surreal as his thoughts, Michael has good days and bad.

Some days, he holds forth on the warfare of angels and demons in the skies above, where clouds may swirl, punctuated by thunder and lightning. "See? There they are, fighting over the souls of the dead? Right there," he once told me on a summer day, pointing and nodding.

On other days, he seems to have the simple clarity of a saint. That is the case on this particular frigid December morning, as he steps out from behind a plastic tarp draped over his nest of blankets and sleeping bags near a building's steam vent.

He won't do the shelters. He has horror stories of sickness, bed bug-infested cots, drug use and violence inside them. He's often been robbed of his few possessions. Over the years, our priest and parish have tried to arrange other housing and psychiatric care, without success.

So, one does what one can, meeting this brother where he is, and with what he needs -- warm clothing, food, a few dollars for coffee or a snack, and friendship, to the extent this gentle and enigmatic man allows that.

So, on this morning, I just want to get inside to the warmth, comfort and spiritual refuge of the church. Michael recognizes my voice, this time, and hurries to my side. I'm grumpy; he is ebullient, and our pace toward the open iron gates of the entrance slows.

"It's a good day," he rasped. "It's a cold day," I grumbled back.

He either didn't hear me, or ignored my reply. "God is so great! He provides what you need. Even a hot shower!" Michael pointed to the steam coming out of a head-high pipe. "They shut down the showers where I was going," he explained, vaguely waving toward an undefined downtown Salt Lake City location, "But then God provided this!"

He went on to list a few other things he attributed to Providence. A place to fill his water jug. People cared enough to check on him, feed him, take him to the free clinic, even just talk for a few moments.

Then, Michael grinned, pointed at the church where he, like me, received baptism a few years back, and said, "And we get to go inside His house and have communion! Hey, it's the Breakfast of Champions!"

And we did that. We climbed the steps inside to the candle-lit darkness, venerate the icons of the saints and stood for the ancient prayers of the liturgy, culminating with the Eucharist.

I watched Michael approach the chalice, a look of awe on his smudged face as he received the mystical Body and Blood of Christ.

As he made his cross and silently walked away, I sighed, ashamed at first, then humbled, and then grateful for the lesson.

For Michael.

Lord have mercy, indeed.

The soul: Not obscure, not ethereal, but our life -- now, and beyond time

One of my favorite contemporary Orthodox Christian scholars is Fr. Stephen Freeman. I am amazed by his prodigious, profound, and loving thoughts and applications of faith. His observations apply well beyond the pale of Orthodoxy, too, IMHO.

Here's an excerpt from this Oak Ridge, Tennessee, priest's blog, "Glory to God for all Things." The blog in its entirety (and it's worth the read) is about the soul, what it is (and it is, generally speaking, NOT what most of us in the West tend to think it is), and how it reveals the eternal best of us, when tended as a spiritual garden.

This sub-section that follows below, however, especially speaks eloquently about the innocence and unconscious wisdom (?) of a child:

Among the more interesting experiences for a priest is the confession of children. The one thing I am certain to avoid is trying to teach children about sin when it is not part of their conscious existence. 

Convincing a child that there is an external parent (God) watching and judging their every thought and action is almost certain to create a certain distance from the soul itself. The question, “Am I ok?” is the language of shame, of broken communion, even communion with the soul. 

But, having done this now for 40 years, I can say that I see a gradual awakening in each child, an awareness of broken communion. The role of a confessor is not to widen that gap, but to help a child learn how it is bridged in Christ. 

I tell parents, “The only thing I want a child to know at first is the absolute certainty of God’s unchanging and unconditional love.” 

It is only in the context of such safety that, in time, an older adolescent can find the forgiveness and healing that they will inevitably need.

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A winter of discontent, a spring of hope and new life

When my wife, children, aunts and uncles and cousins gather Friday in Spokane, Washington to remember and bury my father, lilacs and other spring flowers should be in early bloom under a partly cloudy sky pierced by the rays of a freshening sun.

Saying goodbye to Robert Mims Sr., who died January 17 at age 96, while holding the hand of his wife, 91-year-old Katherine, will seem so much more appropriate as springtime unfolds rather than in the depths of winter, when his sojourn here ended.

It has been a tough year. Lost a job I loved, at the Salt Lake Tribune, after a mass layoff ended 20 years at the newspaper last May. Depression, a frantic search for meaning and purpose, followed. But gradually, buoyed by faith, family and friends, I once more began to move forward.

Then, Dad died. Not unexpectedly, but . . . still. 

This farewell comes after 40 days of the Akathist to Jesus Christ for the Departed prayer, as is the practice of my new Orthodox Christian faith. Dozens of candles have been lit for him, joining other remembrances of beeswax, wick and flame in the narthex shrine of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, adding their light to those lit for other beloved and mourned. . . their light flickering off the shiny surfaces of that "great cloud of witnesses" Paul wrote about, the saints, or at least their icons adorning the walls and ceilings of the temple.

Mom won't be at the memorial. In a wheelchair, on oxygen, unable attend to the most basic physical functions, her memories, ability to speak or understand have long since been robbed as late-stage Alzheimer's disease ushers her toward an end in increasing unconsciousness.

Neither will my "big sister," barely able to walk due to her age, cerebral palsy, and unable to comprehend Daddy's death so directly, given cognitive abilities of a 3-4 year old child. Dad is "with Jesus," my sister Carolyn knows, and that is enough.

I will see them both, my mother and sister, before I fly back to Utah. Likely it will be a final goodbye to the shell of what my once-vibrant, sharp-witted and quick-to-laugh mother was, yearning for a second of recognition. Regardless, she will get my love, a caress, a kiss and a prayer.

In college, I briefly wrote poetry. A professor liked it enough to give me an "A." A collection of those poems, scribbled on white lined paper and stuffed into a three-hole punch binder, have long since been lost, likely tossed during one of many moves over the past decades.

And while I have no delusions about reprising any abilities in that form, here, however flawed, is an attempt, for Dad's sake:

We live, we die
We give, we fly
Leaving in winter
Returning in spring
Flowers and resurrection
We bring

Grief in short
Mourning long
Death comes in ice and snow
Life rides equinoctial song
Memories precious, bitter, sweet
gathered in time short, and long

Father has passed
Buried in soil
Dad is immortal
In dreams nocturnal
A being of love and light
Memories eternal

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