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Guess how I spent my morning? Making phone calls, and worrying.

Well, first I got up, got dressed, made coffee, fed the cat, woke up the kids, crammed breakfast into them, and accounted for everyone’s backpacks and lunches and shoes and masks and reminded the kids at home that they had a dentist appointment later. Then we piled in the car, I dropped off one kid at work, and I dropped off one kid at one school. Then we drove to the other school with the other kid, and then . . . I had doubts. 

Last night, my son said a co-worker at his restaurant casually mentioned she had had COVID symptoms for four days, and she had also been exposed to someone who had tested positive. And she kept on coming to work! So my son told his manager and then went straight into isolation at home until we get more information. 

It’s a fairly distant level of exposure, and there may not even be a virus. No one in our family has symptoms. So I read a few guidelines and I thought it was okay to bring the kids to school? But then I started tracing a hypothetical in my head: Server takes her mask off to vape, and breathes a virus cloud at my son; son comes home and grabs some crackers from the family box; other kids also eat crackers, then go to school and accidentally drool on a class ruler or something;  classmates use the ruler, then go home and kiss their parents; parents need toothpaste and go to Walmart, where they paw through the $2.88 DVD bin without wearing a mask because last they heard, they woke up in a free country . . . yeah, that’s what a pandemic looks like. Even with hand washing and sanitizer and masks and temperature checks. Some people are responsible and some are not. Some get away with it and some don’t. 

So, holding my masked kindergartner’s hand, I stood on the playground six feet away from the school’s director and described the situation, to get her verdict. Then I called the dentist; then I called the pediatrician, where we are supposed to be headed for check-ups with three kids tomorrow; then I texted another mom, whose house one kid was supposed to be going to after school for an outdoor, socially distanced birthday party this afternoon.

I can’t even tell how worried I’m supposed to feel right now! I can’t tell if I overreacted or under reacted. At least I work from home and don’t have to deal with daycare or complicated commutes, so it could be much worse. We just have to wait and see whether the gal at work actually has COVID or not.

But it’s almost noon and I haven’t gotten a damn thing done today, except make a bunch of phone calls for what may or may not be a problem, just because some waitress I’ve never even met apparently just opted out of taking a pandemic seriously. She wasn’t even going to tell anyone she had symptoms! She happened to mention it to my kid, and he’s the one who had to tell the manager. She was completely irresponsible, and that means that all the rest of us have to go into responsibility overdrive. I guess I still have to call the health department and make a report. I can feel myself returning again and again to a well of annoyance at her, and at everyone like her who isn’t taking this stuff seriously. That’s what a pandemic looks like: People who are PROBABLY NOT EVEN BAD PEOPLE are also PROBABLY RESPONSIBLE FOR PEOPLE DYING. And I can’t even tell how worried I’m supposed to feel.

So. What we have here is one of those “two job” situations. The first job we have is to be as responsible and sensible as possible, according to our abilities and circumstances. Make all the phone calls, change all the appointments, disclose all the situations, wash all the hands, etc. This is going to be everyone’s lives for the foreseeable future: Doing the best we can after someone else didn’t.

The other job is to guard our hearts. This is the hard part. This is always the hard part. 

We can keep ourselves and everyone we meet as safe as possible, but still allow our hearts to be completely overcome with resentment, rage, and disgust for the people who put us in this position. And it’s reasonable to do so! And it’s so easy! But it’s the part that can really hurt us. This is the part that will linger with us forever, making us weak and compromised long past this virus season. 

I can’t control anyone else’s behavior. I can’t make people take something seriously if they don’t want to take it seriously. All I can do is control my own behavior to try to mitigate the spread caused by careless and selfish and foolish people. In a pandemic, all I have is my own little portion of the river that runs through my property, as it were. I can’t control what kind of risk and contagion come to me and my family from upstream, but I can control what goes downstream from us.

And while I do it, I can control what I allow to happen in my heart. I have a choice to be as safe as possible while being angry, or to be as safe as possible while . . . being like Jesus, a little bit.

That’s really what it comes down to, you guys. This whole original sin thing? And all the actual sin that happens every minute of the day and night? Not His fault. Not His deal at all. All the muck and disease and pollution and contagion that came to Him from upstream was from other people. None of it was His. It was all from careless and selfish and foolish people like you and me. He was absolutely safe in Heaven from contagion. But He deliberately parked himself mid stream and let himself be exposed. Then, being Immaculate, He not only purified what came out of Him, He looked with pity and kindness on the people upstream, the ones who screwed everything up and hurt Him. That’s what He did. That’s who He is. 

THIS IS THE HARD PART. And . . . this is what we’re supposed to do. 

Can we do this? I am trying. I fail every day, even while the stakes are relatively low, and we’re mostly just dealing with hassle and anxiety, not ventilators and organ failure and financial ruin. I still get so mad. But I am trying. When I start to ruminate on other people’s lousy attitudes, I can take a breath, let it out slowly, and come up with something else to think about, because other topics besides COVID are still important. When the news is making me dig my nails into my palms with frustration, I can turn it off and put on Schubert, instead, because Schubert is real, too. When I realize some rando on Twitter is not interested in having an honest conversation, I can step away and mute him while there’s still some whiff of civility in the air. And I can pray, not only for health, but for peace. And I can make an act of faith that prayer is efficacious even when I don’t see it. 

This is the hard part. Trying to be like Jesus is always the hard part. But when you consider the alternative, what else can we possibly do? We can’t step out of the stream, but we can stand with Him.

Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for the U.S. Census? 

This was back in 2010, and it didn’t last very long. We were pretty desperate for money, so, despite the fact that I once mistook the border between NH and VT on a map for a shortcut — and I once went to visit my sister and only realized how far off course I was when the road in front of me stopped because I had reached the ocean — and I experience the frequent, inexplicable, and irresistible urge to turn left even when I know I’m supposed to turn right — despite all of this, I say, I thought I could work for the census.

I thought maybe if it was literally my job not to get lost, I could keep it together. And I’ve met people who work for the government before, and I felt that I could easily slip into that crowd without being dominated too heavily by anyone’s intellect.  How hard could it be?

It really wasn’t that it was hard.  But it was the government, so it was dumb.

For instance, we were 26 hours into training before they would tell us what our job was going to be.  There were twelve of us being trained, and nobody knew what for. Our supervisor used a kind of radical version of the Socratic method:  rather than asking questions that guided us toward the truth, he would allow us to ask the questions.  He would then stare at us blankly with his mouth open, gaze down at his manual, gaze at us again, and then continue reading aloud as if nothing had happened. He did this so often, people eventually stopped asking him anything, so I guess it worked. 

I clearly remember the moment when we finally got to set aside the training materials and get our actual materials, and it turned out the things they’d been referring to as “binders” were . . . three-ring binders. I was amazed. Everything about the census so far had been so back-assward, I assumed they were calling them binders just because they weren’t. 

Then, actual binders in hand, we found we were going to be “Dependent Quality Control Enumerators,” which meant that we were to look at the maps drawn up by the first round of enumerators, compare them with the lists of addresses and their descriptions, and then compare that to what we actually see on the ground. If we discovered a too-high percentage of certain types of mistakes within a randomly-chosen sample of one area, then the whole area would have to be re-canvassed.

So this was how it worked out. I’m driving down the road, and I see a house.  It’s not on the map.  I add it to the map.  I assign it a map spot number, and add it to the “address add” page.  I transfer numbers from one book to another, I draw a line through certain things and erase others, according to protocol, and I give a questionnaire to the newly discovered residents. 

Except sometimes I couldn’t get to the house because of all the enraged dogs. Sometimes I got shouted at and threatened, and sometimes I got people who refused to even to look at me, as if even briefly lending one’s eye beams to a *ptui* government employee would dilute their purity of essence. 

And some of the people were friendly enough, but . . . .

Numbahs? No, there ain’t no numbahs out heah.
Hey, don’t let the cat owt, friggin coyotes comin’ around.
Census? No, we don’t want none.
We’re both learning disabled, hon.
I got a nail infection. 
Come on in, you kin sit on the love seat, watch the ashtray, don’t knock over my oxygen tank. 
Census, eh? You gonna check up on ME, heh heh heh heh heh? 
Numbahs? No . . . 

Nevertheless, I was a proper government employee. I was finishing my shift with a binder bristling with some kind of information that was surely useful to someone in some way, or if it was actually useless, at least it wasn’t my fault. I was doing it. I was really doing it!

But then we hit a snag.

Every so often, I was supposed go down a particular highway, go down a particular road, turn right, and choose a house at random, and then verify the information that is already on the books about this randomly-chosen house. This was supposed to add an extra layer of certitude that the information wasn’t being manipulated by rogue mapmakers who might send Dependent Quality Control Enumerators to the trailer parks they wanted to be counted, rather than the trailer parks they didn’t want to be counted, or something.

So I did what I was told. I went down the highway, I went down the road, I turned left, and I chose a nice house that looked especially random to me, and I marked everything down just like I was supposed to. Random house all accounted for. 

Then I went back to turn in my day’s work, and the supervisor reviewed it. He traced back through everything I had done, and then he said, “But why did you turn left?” 

As previously explained, I don’t know why I turned left. Sometimes I just turn left, okay? You’re just lucky we didn’t all end up in the ocean this time!

But I didn’t say that. I did say, “Well, it’s supposed to be a random house, and this was definitely random, so I guess it doesn’t really matter, ha ha.”

I swear, a quiver went through his body. He looked down at the binder as if he were gathering his strength, and he said quietly, “You were supposed to turn right.”

I said, “I know, but it’s random, so . . . ”

SO NOTHING. It was the U.S. Government, and it had to be the specific kind of random in the protocol, not the other kind of random! You can’t just randomly be random! You have to be the authorized kind of random, or else it ISN’T AUTHORIZED, AND YOU HAVE TO GO BACK.

So I had to go back, and this time I turned right. I randomly chose another house. I wrote everything down in all the books. And then I quit.

And that’s what happened what I worked for the census. 

I told a priest I was so tired of the Catholic Church. I told him I wasn’t leaving, and I wasn’t apostatizing. (Where the hell else would I go?) But I was so tired.

Every encounter I had with Catholics lately seemed to have nothing to do with anything Jesus taught us. I was really rattled. It was murderously hot, and I was sweating and agitated, and full of righteous anger. Sick of the Church, and with good reason.

And he laughed at me. This old, old man with brown, placid eyes waved away a mosquito that floated by his face, and he laughed gently. Birds sang and tears leaked into my mask. We were sitting on benches outdoors, where a safely socially distanced confession could be heard, in front of a grotto for Mary. It was a place I had forgotten existed.

The grotto is a cool, dim spot behind the church, surrounded by trees. It smells of pine, and there are weathered benches grouped around, so you can sit and pray. It turns out they built it because a young boy insisted he saw Mary there. Did he? I have no idea. There is no record that I can find, other than a plaque mounted on the little stone shrine below the statue of Our Lady.

I had to admit, it was a place of unusual peace; a good place to calm down and recollect myself. I had forgotten it was there.

“You know, Jesus said the Church will last until the end of time. The gates of hell won’t prevail, you know,” Fr Bill said, smiling.

And do you know, I had forgotten this. I had fallen into thinking that Jesus was sort of trapped at the center of a clotted tangle of Catholicism, and that as long as I wanted Jesus, I would need to prove myself by fighting my way through that ugly, irrelevant tangle to be with him.

But that’s not really how it is. Jesus doesn’t just sort of put up with the Church, the way you or I put up with pointless rules and regulations before we can get our license or our permit or our degree. He’s not just with the Church because the Church is the hoops you have to jump through. The Church isn’t going anywhere, and its deep and ancient goodness, truth, and beauty are unchanged, changeless.

But sometimes we forget what we have, when we have the Church.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.