I am a metronome.
At the tempo of my racing heart (faster than I’d like, but not fast enough to kill me), I oscillate madly between my extremes of fear and faith. It happens when I make my morning meal, it happens when I take my evening shower, and it happens every moment in between.
Fear and faith. Fear and faith. Fear… and faith.
It’s been seven months since I’ve written anything here, in this silly little archive of my words. That’s not for lack of trying. I’ve had post after post half-written, then discarded with some mix of a sigh and a manic laugh. None of them were enough. Nothing I could possibly write could ever be enough.
I could talk about death, maybe. How our politics have so inured us to death, conditioned us to view some deaths as acceptable or even inevitable, that Israel can starve the entire Gaza strip to death on live TV and most of our politicians will keep signing the checks for more and more bombs, guns, and missiles. How in our own country, vaccines and pasteurization – things that, along with better maternal care, increased the average human lifespan by a full fifty percent in the twentieth century – are being demonized, while our kids are dying in more school shootings and fatal car crashes every year.
I could add anecdotes about my own suicidality. After all, this year has been an eventful one for Team Samantha’s Intrusive Thoughts. When that metronome arm in my soul is swinging toward the “fear” side, my brain fills up with such wonderful refrains. It would be so easy, so quick, it whispers. There’s no more fear, no more anger, just nothing. Just nothing forever. I could talk about how I’m certainly not alone in that, how it just so happens that the subway system here in Boston changed their automatic announcements at stations this year. Now, every time a train is approaching, the automated voice gently tells people to step back from the edge. Increased safety culture at the ol’ Transportation Authority? Maybe. But also, almost certainly, more people like me who get those annoying whispers when they’re waiting for their train home.
Perhaps I could talk instead about resurrection. It’s an idea central to my faith, after all. I could pontificate about how I think it’s a tragedy that the symbol of Christianity around the world is a cross, instead of an empty tomb. Do I know what a symbol of an empty tomb would look like? Fuck no. But it’d have much better meaning than a cross. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t special for being crucified; the Roman empire crucified thousands and thousands of people. He was special because he got back up again, and the promise of my Christian faith is that through his resurrection, we all are resurrected.
I could trace a fragile thread of hope through the better moments of the past half year, to talk about how no matter how much hate and death and suffering there is in the world right now, it is possible to rebuild. Mandatory to, even. I could talk about what it means to me to do the work of resurrection as my society steadily feeds itself into the ever-widening gyre of fascism.
But talking about death at the moment just makes me want to do it, and talking about resurrection and hope feels fake. “Don’t worry, guys,” my inner clickbait YouTube host says, “there’s still goodness in the world. I’m taking a hundred random sick people and covering their medical bills, and this is a video for people’s entertainment instead of a thing that the government just does for everyone because we live in a death cult! Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”
You know, even on my bad days, I think today’s fascist America is a fragile house of cards just waiting for the right stiff breeze to knock it over. I know that eventually, whether through right-wingers killing themselves and their children with raw foods and a pathological hatred of modern medicine or through the sheer weight of injustice, a new day will dawn and people will be free. I think the genocide in Gaza will be stopped, and its perpetrators brought to justice. I’m an optimist like that, I guess.
It’s just that on those bad days, it’s hard to imagine myself and the people I care for most actually living to see it.
Things are getting worse before they get better. That’s just a fact. How much worse? Hard to say. How much better? Also hard to say. And as the mechanisms of our society turn, I tick back and forth.
Fear and faith.
There’s an old Scottish hymn that’s been on my mind this year, written by George Matheson after he lost his eyesight and his fiancee left him. It’s titled “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”, and its third and most poignant verse says:
“Oh Joy that seeks me through the pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain
And feel the promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be.”
I’d like to think, as my soul ticks back and forth between my fear and my faith, that the song I’m setting the tempo for sounds something like that. In the meantime, I’m going to go hug my wife and try to get a decent night’s sleep.
No recipe for you today, other than a hearty endorsement of taking frozen imitation crab sticks, defrosting them, slicing them into 1-inch-long bits, tossing them in some soy sauce, and serving them over rice. Shake some shichimi togarashi on top, if you like spice and flavor. A perfect meal with not much effort, whether you’re fearing or hoping and believing.
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