Praying With Jazz For Lent

WHEN THE CHAOS gets too much, I listen to jazz. I’m not an aficionado. I just know that brave jazz refreshes my freedom. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz.

The stay of execution offered by a COVID-19 vaccine allows for a giddy, perilous optimism. Even a minute crack in our coronavirus armor brings up emotions too dangerous, too chaotic to express: A trembling wave of the suffering we have endured, heavy across the shoulders like the splintery weight of the cross.

For ballast against overwhelming rage, I turn to The Five Quintets by poet Micheal O’Siadhail: “Be with me Madam Jazz I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow.”