Plans

Come and hear, all who fear God.

I will tell what he did for my soul:

Blessed be God who did not reject my prayer

nor withhold his love from me.

Psalm 66:16, 20

Sometime stuff happens and our plans go out the window. Sometimes lots of stuff happens and it would seem as if everyone's plans and lives collapse into a mess. That has been COVID-19. The loss of life has not been comparable to the outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, but the information overload and underload, the confusion, the changes, the turnarounds, the posturing, the intervention by police, the deniers, working and learning at home, who can shop where and when, the endless briefings and proclamations would be comparable to any catastrophic event of the past since 1914. Wars, political, economic and social upheaval have long ruined lives, but there is always an underlying resilience to the human spirit that enables communities, towns, cities, states and countries to rebuild, to start again.

We are given a sense of purpose and hope that springs from that resilience and drive. Being purposeful about our lives is what differentiates us from other animals – our capacity to choose our futures and to plan to make them real. Of course there are strictures on how much and for how long we can plan ahead and so we cater for the necessary adjustments and flexibility that are required. If there is a dimension missing - it is about the most significant relationship we have from the minute of our conception, to our last breath and thence into eternity itself – with our God. In a life well lived, regardless of the plan, this relationship provides links between each of those moments of significance, of holiness, perhaps even sacraments (with a small ‘s’) – those ritual, grace-filled and grace-fueled moments that are memorialized in photographs, bonds, celebrations and shared grief. John the Evangelist assures us (John 14:18): I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. We are not left to our devices without his presence in and through our relationships.

God has does have a plan for each of us. As we walk though our lives, his plan becomes ever more clearer. We can look back over our shoulders and see his companionship as we seek to find and explore who and what we are called to be. I can assure you that having reached the ledge on the edge of retirement, I can see my growth as a person. The stumbles are even more clear from this height. Even clearer is that God's plan has always carried me when my own plans have failed.

Although God’s grace is given freely, God does ask something of us in return: If you love me, you will keep my commandments (John 14:15), that is, love God and love your neighbour. If this is the way I have lived my life, then I can be assured that the choices I set my sights on will be blessed, successful and a hymn of praise to the God who loves us.

Peter Douglas

Poems for a Pandemic

from an article of the same title in America of 12 May 2020

Horseshoe Bat

by Dan McIsaac

This hell-bent thing, Cain’s clawed familiar,
like another plague out of Exodus
carries a baleful load of virus
in its trussed body for sale or barter.

Drawn to the rafters on scissoring wings,
from safe haven, the darkling is clubbed and seized,
a wary collector staying clear
of the flailing brute’s stalactite fangs.

Is there any horror in this skittish thing
except in its unclean capture and killing?
Velveteen fur and clownish muzzle,
webbed wings like a ruptured umbrella,

no hell-flame struck from those matchstick limbs,
these orchid ears heard no infernal drums,
and its teeth caught only beetles and flies
in the pandemonium of the night sky.

Financing the Burials
by Lisa Ampleman

During Holy Week
a city councilman
calls for a relief fund
so his working-class
constituents can afford
to cremate or bury
their dead, the city
currently providing
only its standard $900
and even that only
for legal residents.
He speaks
for those without
a Joseph of
Arimathea
able to step in,
claim the body,
keep their loved one
out of the potter’s
field—a phrase
that began with actual
fields from which
potters removed
all the useful
clay, appropriate for
deeper trenches,
“a burial place for
strangers”—
New York’s longtime
burial for the poor
being an island in
Long Island Sound,
once a prison camp,
now a bird sanctuary.
These 1,700 dead
and counting
(from his Queens
district alone)
might not be wrapped
with fine linens or placed
in a rock-hewn tomb,
but he works
to provide them
their own place.
Bodega clerks, food-
delivery drivers,
caretakers for
the sick: he hopes
to treat justly
in death those who,
he says, are keeping
the city alive.

From This Distance
by Cameron Alexander Lawrence

The shadows on the wall, our close companions,
begin as light—a trespass through trees and glass

before transfiguring the carpeted hall:
in the painting of an open window, the curtains

blow forever toward a sea, unseen over hills,
far from our domestic urgency,

where the southern morning breaks in,
echoing on the surfaces, the sway of pine and sweet gum

—everything we shut out,
even now, with the wind-speckled lake and the reeds
            ecstatic as holy rollers,
even as the hospitals and morgues fill and fill,

I’m caught in my longing to be with you
somewhere else, lost in the surge of ten million

beating hearts beneath the tall towers,
uncountable strangers going about their lives,

their warmth separate from ours and not.

Quarantine
By Sonja Livingston

My father-in-law is coming to the end.
My husband drives over and stands beneath his bedroom window.

He tells his father about bluebirds in the park, how the cats
are doing, says he remembers when he was seven
and they went sledding on the hill in Acton.
My husband stands beneath the window
head tilted 45 degrees, taking in sky and pane and glass.

When he was a boy he thought his father was Superman.
Now his father has something to say but the words fall apart
before they leave his mouth.

It’s late March. Most of the snow has melted.
My husband stands under the window listening to the last
of his father’s voice, golden crocuses coming up at his feet