Lent, Grounding, and COVID-19

“During these forty days, I hope you carve out time to spend in meditation gardens,” our pastor Kate Martin said, a little before Lent began. Rather than seeing the season as a time for self-deprivation, our pastor invited the congregation to see it as a time to connect to our bodies and to the earth. How grounded must Jesus have been, she said, in order to feed and heal and love and serve as he did? I welcomed her perspective: If nothing else, it was a pleasant alternative to giving up television. That was right before COVID-19 seeped through California with a speed that startled us, right before rising statistics turned portions of our country’s map red like spots of blood. Now, gardens, parks, campgrounds, and beaches in San Diego are closed, and church is on the television. And that’s the least of it.

When a life-long friend of mine received some of the worst news a person can, the COVID-19 restrictions meant that her husband was waiting hopefully outside, rather than allowed into the doctor’s office with her. When she relayed the message to me via text, I cried for them both and felt even more profoundly inept in the face of the news than I might have before the spread of the virus. I couldn’t promise to get on a plane soon; I couldn’t even a send a card without fear of spreading germs.

It used to be that I called my grandmother for a laugh, as she’s one of the funniest people I know. Now I call her in a perpetual state of nervousness, hoping the virus will take as long to spread through Mitchell County, N.C., as decent internet. I urge my parents not to visit her. They are scared that if they don’t, she’ll forget to pay her bills. They fear her electricity will go off. They fear she’ll go hungry.

This is the Lentiest Lent, and there is no end in sight. It wouldn’t hurt so much that my husband and I canceled our Easter plans (a Los Angeles weekend with the California contingent of my college crew, all of us transplants from the South and planning to have an old-fashioned Sunday dinner) if I knew when I would ever see any of them again. Will it be June? 2022? It makes me think of the children’s classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Narnia is under the White Witch’s rule, she makes it so that it is “always winter, never Christmas.” This feels like always Lent, and never Easter.

And yet: Spring is here, and when I take a break from my petulance, I can see it with the type of clarity and interest with which I saw the world at 9 years old, after I got my first pair of glasses. I used to walk right past the dunes that line the beach. Now, I can no longer play in the ocean’s waves on a Saturday, but I can walk up to the amber sea oats and watch them shake in the wind. So, I do. I can’t visit Sequoia National Park this spring as I planned. But I can walk around my neighborhood. I can notice the flushes of pale pink that stain the petals of fat orange roses, the scent of jasmine wafting from ivy-covered garden walls, the tiny golden centers of violet pinwheel blossoms.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, blooms and hints of springtime are signs that Aslan (Christ) is on the move, and the reign of the White Witch is coming to an end. It is so like all of us daughters of Eve and sons of Adam to scan the Earth (or the news) as the Pevensie children did, for promises of a better future, and a different reality than the one we’re in. We are impatient to know: When will there be a vaccine? When can I see my loved ones, and will they be OK? When will the stock market rise, and when. the. hell. can I get my hair cut?

It is trite to say we can never know just what the future holds, but the cliché seems more apt now than ever. Thinking back to my pastor’s pre-Lenten sermon, I add a third goal for myself. In addition to feeling grounded in my body and in-tune with the earth’s cycles, I want to find peace with the present moment, however long this one lasts. I think this self-appointed goal is in the same spirit as the other two, perhaps inseparable from them.

Pastor Martin said, “If we look to Jesus, we see a life lived embodied, an inner world intricately connected to the outer world: a life not just of prayer and meditation but of feeding and of clothing and living in the thick of it, the muddy, messy, dirty, gritty, bloody life of being human on planet Earth.” Maybe, I think, if I give up asking when things will be different, I might just find a way to be helpful in the midst of my community’s suffering.

Probably, I’ll be happier too, if I’m not looking at daily life through the lens of restrictions on it. The other day I did something I’ve been meaning to for a long time: I stretched out on a blanket in my apartment’s courtyard. The courtyard is a small, oval-shaped patch of grass with one lone tree in the center, seemingly a far cry from the Sequoias. But as I drank in the breeze and the sunshine and let myself feel the grooves of the dirt, I knew I couldn’t have had a more “grounded” moment anywhere. At one point I opened my eyes and looked up through the bare branches of the jacaranda, which hasn’t bloomed yet. The sky was open, like the door in Revelation which no one can shut. Stunning in its blueness and more expansive than the ocean. Limitless, as I felt in that moment.