Precursor: The following essay was written in a motel in Wyoming in mid-December 2020. Although circumstances surrounding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have changed, its insights are best appreciated in remembering circumstances surrounding the virus.
Wyoming in winter is filled with ghosts. Gazing across the ethereal blue fields of snow, one has a ready sense that the landscape is haunted. Such thoughts are on my mind as I grip the steering wheel and try to give myself to God and the road. It’s been nine minutes out of the half-hour I demarcated for silence on today’s drive, and metanoia remains elusive. All I can think of is tuning back to a cobbled mix of Amy Grant, Steve Earle, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry—the only company I will have on my journey in solitude from Colorado to California. Just you, God, and the road. Somehow not enough.
Writing those words brings a brief flash of defiant psychosis to my mind. Didn’t I listen to the Doctors? Do I have a soul? Do I love my family? If I did, I would have stayed in Denver—celebrated my first Christmas away from family. I know it will happen eventually, and twenty-seven times I’ve been able to batten that off. I was getting ready to finally do so this year when my brother suggested that I avoid the crowds and drive instead, hence the reason why I write this from a series of motels in Rock Springs and Winnemucca. I write because I am unable to bring a justification for my journey to match these challenges from without.
“Love,” writes Maximus the Confessor in the first of his Chapters, “is a good disposition of the soul by which one prefers no being to the knowledge of God.” If that is the standard, then this season has showed how much all of us have failed in Christian love. Real love would mean not risking others’ infection. Isolating while all of my housemates left for their homes to Zoom in with my family instead. I would let God be with me—satisfaction abounding. But I cannot love like God. If I was perfect, I would be to my family at all places and times, and they would to me. That is not how it is. In the year of a global pandemic, I moved to a new place and pined for home. I have been humbled, and I need to see my family again as much as I need God—and recognizing the parity of these desires reminds me ever more of my weakness as a Christian. In a time when we are called to remain apart from one another, remaining in God should be more than enough—our time to shine, to evangelize, show the world that we can abide isolation if Christ abides in us.
I told all of this to my parents—still they wanted me to come home, my exact intent as I was seeking not so much for them to talk me out of returning as much as into it. The Christian, Civic, and Human thing that I was told to do was to stay home. And I’m not. I’m driving home with Trappist beer, Japanese whiskey, and a staff that I carved as a present for my brother. I feel caution in doing so, but not guilt. Anyone’s first year of teaching strips them bare, even in a non-2020 circumstance. I’ve already tried to give myself in teaching. I love what I do, and that should be enough. It isn’t. I need my family. It ain’t Christian, look at Luke 12:53 for Christ’s sake! Yes, for Christ’s literal sake. Perfect love would be needless, no families, no community, just you and the Lord—an anti-natalist’s dream. So why do I see no conflict in returning home?
Passing along the ghostly snow, life’s finitude cuts to the bone in a hard and special way.
Of course it would be easy for God to stay home—God is perfect rationality and all, right? Yet what is more irrational to human beings than perfect rationality? Can we comprehend what that would look like in action, to make a choice so obvious that it makes utter emotional and logical sense, resulting in utter attunement for all involved? Benedict said at Regensburg that God is perfectly rational—and here I am acting in irrationality according to the public health experts in whom I place my trust. Yes, I masked up and yes I’m driving and yes I and my family both want to do this, but pure and perfect love in accordance with God would have all of us stay home, as best as I can fathom.
Or perhaps it’s the reverse—a recognition that we were not made for isolation and any attempt to control the pandemic is humans play-acting at God. Yet another belief that we are nature’s masters rather than its stewards. Eyes fixed again on the road, I batten such thoughts away in recollection of how much stupidity that they have justified in our time. The thought hangs with me as the sun drops.
Crashing into the Rock Springs Hotel, I shed layers and unpack food from a cooler—no take-out, no restaurants. Wrestling with the question of whether or not I’m acting in love, I surrender and embrace finitude. The finitude of relapsing from sobriety. Of wanting to provide and being unable. Of chasing a vocation and coming up short. Of being told that the charity you just gave to out of love is inefficient and wasteful and you should have run it by Peter Singer first. Of trying to know what exactly Jesus would do and failing to do it. Collapsing on the bed, I feel echoes of John XXIII’s remarks to God that It’s YOUR Church, now you take over. The day fading and darkness taking over, I take peculiar consolation in the knowledge that whatever decision I make out of love as a Christian, I will never share the certainty that it’s the absolute, hundred-percent, right step. My—our—calling as Christians is to embrace our finitude in infinite ways, knowledge of goodness included. All that we can do is trust and love in our weakness as human beings.
Darkness comes, and I lose the thought. I don’t get to finish this essay until days later, once I’m back and masked at home. In reflecting on the insights born by Wyoming’s specters, the insights elude me once again. All I can write of is what I tried to snatch at. Yet another imperfection in which we as Christians are not called to revel but to rise.
