Wednesday, April 29, 2020

28/04/2020


1. My microherbs are growing well. A few weeks ago, Mum and I went downstairs solely for the purpose of digging up mud to plant seeds in. Mum planted parsley, I think, and I began a new pot of purple kohlrabi. It was strange, crouching there, digging up the mud that had settled in the drain having run off the hill behind us during the rain. It felt child like and good. We saw some worms, which reminded me of how much I loved worms when I was younger, and would hold them tenderly in my hands, feeling their fragile bodies wiggle. 


2. Breakfasts now are always on the balcony. After almost 2 weeks without peanut butter, I cracked and bought some after a morning run, which meant the joyful restoration of overnight oats as my daily breakfast. I sit with my breakfast and the bible, and now Jacob and I are reading the book of Matthew. Today I read about how Jesus welcomed the children. I'd always read that bit as meaning the Kingdom of God belonged to those who are innocent, which is frankly rather demoralising, since few of us are. But I remembered today that the myth of the innocent child is a 19th century construction. I don't know how ancient Israelites thought of children, but I do know that children were vulnerable, with infant mortality significantly high (one source I looked at said 50%). So today I reread the passage as Jesus welcoming the vulnerable, those who recognise that are lives are brief and fragile, and that we owe our existence and every breath to God. Jesus welcomes those who realise that we need God as a child needs a parent. That's a frightening and comforting realisation all at once. 

3. Yesterday was a mixed bag for my confidence. I had an encouraging conversation with my boss in the morning about my work so far and how I was getting on in the office. It was good to hear feedback - I realise that in university you get so much feedback on essays but that is far less common in the workplace and you really have to operate a lot more independently. To distil our conversation into a sentence - I'm doing alright, there are areas to work on, the future is exciting and my workplace is supportive.  

As I was speaking to my boss, messages came pinging in on my phone. I'd started a group conversation for something that I felt God putting on my heart, and the messages were coming in from there. There were lots of questions, there was a lot of information. I found myself doubting my ability to shape something out of this conversation, and feeling naïve and stupid. I felt like Moses - 'I have never been a good speaker (or leader). I wasn't one before you spoke to me, and I'm not one now.' But I still couldn't shake the feeling that God was asking me to keep on with this, to keep leaning into this project and these thoughts and to see what fruit comes from this. I read a line in an article which went: moments of losing courage belong to a brave life. I recently discovered that my Hogwarts house is not Hufflepuff as I thought, but Gryffindor, and so I am trying to own my new brave persona. It is good to know that even when I feel like my fortitude is crumbling, that is not an absence of bravery but part of the in-and-out of its breathing.


4. The smoggers came yesterday and the world was shrouded for a while. I remembered how as I child I would bury my face into my pillow when the smoggers came, terrified that the smog was poisonous. (If it could kill mosquitos, I reasoned, what was to say it wouldn't kill me?) I would press myself so tight into that pillow that it became hard to breathe, and the feeling of suffocating would just add to the idea that death was all around me.

5. At night, Mum only got back from the hospital after we finished dinner. 'Could you make me a hot Milo,' she said, and I did, supplementing it with a chocolate-banana muffin for good measure. I learnt that three of the residents at the care home had died, but those deaths won't be counted in the UK's tally. How can this be? Some things in this world now seem so inhuman.

6. I made these most delicious chocolate muffins yesterday. I made 10, have packed 3 of them to deliver to Jacob, Ben and Kim, and now there is only one left. I have to say, these are good

7. I'm using this time to continue filling in the poetry anthology that Jacob and I share. I put in the poem Jacob wrote for me last year, Jonathan's geylang garden, the poem I write for Jacob last year (the pebble poem) and Wendy Cope's flowers - a poem Rachel shared which comforted me for what I felt were stolen dreams - 'some things don’t come to fruition but we carry the intentions of them with us just as well'.
Flowers (Wendy Cope)
Some men never think of it. You did. You’d come along And say you’d nearly brought me flowers But something had gone wrong. The shop was closed. Or you had doubts - The sort that minds like ours Dream up incessantly. You thought I might not want your flowers. It made me smile and hug you then. Now I can only smile. But look, the flowers you nearly brought Have lasted all this while.

Monday, April 20, 2020

Love in a time of Corona


1. Have you ever been jealous of a book character? I recently read Sally Rooney's Normal People, and aside from being left breathless at the tenderness and intensity of the story and the relationship in the story, I was also incredibly jealous of the main characters. Having been on lockdown for two weeks now, reading a book about an intimate relationship between two people is difficult when the person you are most intimate with is out of your reach (by law). (Despite the jealousy I was still highly impressed, and wrote about the book in three letters to beloved friends, and then gushed about the book for an hour on the phone with Ching.)

This lockdown has meant that Jacob and I have returned to a period in our relationship which I thought was over when I left London - that is, the semi-long distance. Except this time I can't hop on a train and get to him. Thankfully the things we learnt while in a semi-long distance relationship still apply, and the nightly calls and praying together have reinstated themselves as a precious part of my day. 

2. We've also tried a skype date, since the video call has taken over as the world's foremost method of communication. We dressed up, both cooked a form of pasta, set our respective tables, and talked about anything apart from the virus. I even put on lipstick, and a scarf so I could take it off when I 'got to the restaurant'. 'I feel like I'm in Florence,' I told my Mum as I carried my mushroom ragu to the backroom study table. We talked about the past and the future, and there was a lot of smiling, and a healthy dose of flirting, and then we went to the 'movies' afterwards and finished watching 'It Happened One Night'.

3. Hannah had her birthday over zoom. The whole screen was filled with people who loved her. Friends sent flowers and ice cream. Auntie Sarah tried to balance 26 candles on three rich tea biscuits, succeeding just in time for us to sing a wobbly, laggy 'Happy birthday to you'.

4. I called L one afternoon. She is so beautiful, and I remembered the last time I saw her in a cafe in Dalston, when we talked about home. She gave me a card which is still at my empty office desk, to remind me that I am not alone. It is right next to R's card which says 'Love in your new place'. In our call she cried. 'Seeing your face reminds me of how much I miss you,' she said. I miss you has almost become a synonym phrase for 'I love you.'

5. Every time we think it might be possible to see each other, something seems to prevent it. The cycle of anticipation and crushed hope is exhausting. 'You can feel these emotions,' Mum told me one evening as I lay in bed sobbing, 'but you can't drown in them. Find a current and come back up.'

'I don't know how,' I said - everything felt tired, everything felt lost.

The next day I did a walking meditation, imagining myself meeting Jesus. He places his hand on my shoulder and I tell him everything I am afraid of, right now. I'm afraid of not seeing Jacob and drowning in sadness, I'm afraid of making the wrong decisions. 

I was meant to imagine Jesus responding to my fear. He didn't give me an answer to tough decisions, or a vision of seeing Jacob again (although those would surface in my dreams periodically). All he said was the truth,

'You are loved, I love you.'

Perfect love casts out fear, in a way that doesn't offer false promises. There are still decisions, and still pain and longing. But also love.

6. On Monday I lay on a long piece of mahjong paper as Hannah traced my body from chest up with my arms outstretched. I coloured in my arms, my neck, my hair, and drew my eyes, nose, mouth. I remembered the artist in London, telling the life drawing group to fill in my limbs with curved lines so that they looked more life-like. I left lighter spots in the creases of my elbows and shaded in shadows under my jaw and eyes, the sides of my nose. I created a life-size, cropped paper me, all ready for a hug. Where I can't touch Jacob - and I shall never take that privilege for granted again - I can still send him a hug, like this.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Lament in a time of Corona


 
Yesterday was a day for a lot of crying and tears. After the country announced stricter social distancing measures on Friday (euphemistically called a 'circuit breaker', but really a more benign version of a lockdown), I didn't really have time to sit with myself and figure out how I was feeling. But the slower and more isolated weekend meant things began to sink in, and on Sunday I found myself grieving. 

I tried to list down what I was grieving over, and came up with:

- Loss of time
- Missing Jacob
- Feeling unsafe
- Loss of freedom
- Loss of intimacy
- Sudden upheaval and change
- Loss of dreams of what could happen
- Fear and uncertainty over how long this will last
- Loss of community (particularly church community)
- Fear and uncertainty over my ability to be a good friend
- Fear and uncertainty for the world, particularly for India and friends in the UK
- Loss of feeling like I can do a good job at work/not knowing how to best use my time for work

I listened to a sermon from the Globe church, where Jonty preached about fear and trust. Fear, he said, is not wrong. Fear is not shameful or weak. Fear is seeing what is real and what is bad and what is threatening and recognising its magnitude and your limitations. But fear can be met with trust, because trust is seeing a good and loving and powerful God, and recognising His infinite magnitude and love for us. A God who is bigger than what we fear. So I prayed for trust in the morning.

In the evening, I walked to Phoon Huat to buy chickpeas (and as usual came away with much more than that). While walking down and standing in the socially distanced queue, I listened to another sermon by Jonty, where he preached about tears and hope. Tears, he said, are not wrong, or shameful, or weak. They are a natural response to the brokenness and sin in our world. They are a lament that expresses pain and cried 'how long? how long will this last?' But lament is directed to a God gives light in the darkness, who knows the end, and who promises rejoicing. A God who gives us the choice to trust in his unfailing love, and to rejoice in a God who saves, and to praise because God has been good. And so I prayed for hope in the evening.

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In my third year, I wrote an essay in tragedy term about lament, comparing a Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women, and the book of Lamentations in the Bible. I changed it a little (particularly after realising I had a real tendency for very long sentences), but I was reminded of the hope woven into lament in that book of the bible:

In Lamentations 3, the voice changes from a female voice traditionally used to ‘give voice to suffering and evoke empathy, appealing to the mercy of God’, to the male voice of the Geber, ‘intended to emphasise the need to accept responsibility for suffering and to find a way forward, propitiating the holy demands of God’.  The Geber inherits the female Zion’s narrative of guilt and sorrow and puts it to action, invoking the community to ‘search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.’ The recognition of wrong that results from understanding a divine and righteous God provokes propitiatory action to restore right relationship with God. 

This is seen in the pivotal verse 18, translated in the Authorised version as ‘My strength and my hope is perished from the LORD’ – however, Conway highlights that there is ‘no verb in the second half of the bicolon in the Hebrew’ and thus the verse ‘can be translated as a verbless clause ‘He has destroyed my endurance, and/but my hope is from Yhwh’, transforming hopelessness to hope. This then introduces the hopeful verses that follow, which recall that ‘the LORD’s great mercies […] are new every morning’. 

The sudden surge of hope in this chapter is based on ‘remembrance’ of God’s past mercy which the Geber ‘recall[s] to [his] mind’. This frees the lament from the confines of Jerusalem’s current situation and plight to contextualise it within the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. By placing it within a history of relationship between God and Israel, remembrance also provokes the active call in 3:40-41: ‘Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD./ Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens’. The repeated ‘let us’ signals future action that offers hope. 

Hope does not seem to conclude the book, however, which ends with the plea ‘Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old./ But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.’ (Lam 5:21-22). This seems to grate against the form of the lament, which borrows from Mesopotamian city lament, a form which 'expresses the efficacy of prayer and the goodwill of the deity by concluding with the gods’ return'. (Boda, Dempsey and Flesher, 2012) This is where it is crucial to view Lamentations as a book within a larger compilation of Jewish history, poetry, and prophecy. The last words of Lamentations cannot be read as hopeless despair but the beginning of a new chapter, as the failure of God's definitive return at the close of this tragedy is mediated first by the prophecies of the coming Messiah and the restoration of Jerusalem after exile, and finally by the incarnation of Jesus.

Citations:

Boda, M.J., Dempsey, C.J., and Flesher, L.S. (Eds.) (2012). Daughter Zion: Her Portrait, Her Response. Atlanta, Georgia: Society of Biblical Literature.