Another Irrational Season
The secrets of the atom are not unlike Pandora’s box, and what we must look for is not the destructive power but the vision of interrelatedness that is desperately needed on this fragmented planet. We are indeed part of a universe. We belong to each other; the fall of every sparrow is noted, every tear we shed is collected in the Creator’s bottle.
— Madeleine L’Engle, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth
Dear Ones,
I’ve been finding it hard to find a rhythm for this season. The pandemic started last year around the Christian season of Lent, and now Lent has come back around again. In the meantime, all the other seasons, ecclesiastical and meteorological, have come and gone, and yet the days all seem the same. I have been trying to read through some of the daily prayers in Phyllis Tickle’s series, The Divine Hours, and, last fall, picked up Madeleine L’Engle’s book The Irrational Season during Advent, hoping to find there, as I often have in Madeleine’s work, meaning and resonance from her life that informs the present.
The title of that book comes from a poem Madeleine wrote entitled After Annunciation:
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.
But besides finding it hard to find a rhythm for this season, I’ve also been finding it hard to read, to concentrate on themes and ideas, when the stress and fear and grief of this time grips my mind as well as my body. As I wrote here last year, I’ve been falling back on science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels, that let me forget the harder parts of my life and the world, and inhabit another world for a time. But with non-fiction books, I keep picking them up, reading a page or two, then putting them down again.
So, last fall, I kept trying to get into an Advent-ish frame of mind, kept trying to read, but then it was Christmas, and then Epiphany, and I still hadn’t felt present for Advent. It was autumn, and then winter, and now it’s only a few weeks till spring, and I still haven’t felt fully present for the brilliance of New England’s fall foliage, now long fallen, trees stripped bare.
Still, I keep coming back to The Irrational Season, the book, the poem, and the phrase itself. I think Madeleine used it to mean that God’s ways are wild and different than ours. It was irrational of God to become incarnate in a young, unmarried, marginalized girl, and yet that is where the beauty and power of the incarnation lie. But I keep thinking that this season, this endless pandemic, this terrifying political moment in the United States, is a different kind of irrational season. Irrational as in meaningless. Irrational as in reckless, destructive. Irrational as in evil.
It is irrational that there are clear, simple ways to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic and people refuse to do them. It is irrational that public health is a political issue at all, irrational for a government to have the resources to help its citizens and choose not to. It is irrational that the poor and starving are pitted against each other when it is the wealthy and powerful that hoard wealth and spend political capital to make themselves wealthier. It is irrational that we do not love each other, when love is the only thing that will save us.
I think of Sporos, the farandola in A Wind in the Door, who fought his deepening into community in favor of selfishness and a false freedom. Sporos ultimately realized that his own life was tied up with that of his neighbors’, and chose the path not only of self-fulfillment but of neighbor-love. Right now it feels like there are millions of Sporoses, making decisions that harm us all, including themselves. And, like Meg, I feel helpless to convince them that all our lives hang in the balance. In the book, Sporos finally understands, finally deepens. But that is fiction. I can escape there, but when I return to reality, to the present moment, what can I do in the face of such continued irrationality? I really don’t know.
I’ve been trying to find a rhythm to this irrational season, but maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s outside of the ecclesiastical seasons, outside of summer, winter, fall, and spring. Maybe these really are unprecedented times, and time itself has somehow lost its rhythm. Or maybe it’s something we will only be able to understand in hindsight. Maybe it is something that we have to live through first, and understand later.
In the meantime, dear ones, take care of yourselves, and take care of each other. Be gentle with yourselves, and be gentle with each other. We might not be able to convince others to save us, but we can love each other, as best we can. We can keep vigil for each other as best we can. We can stay present, for ourselves and each other, as best we can. And maybe we will find that we have created a new season, of love, of perseverance, of interrelatedness. A season of a better kind of irrationality than the one we were given.
Tesser well,
Jessica
