anticipatience

The last two mornings, I woke to the creaking of a mattress and the sound of skin sliding across cotton sheets. My back, by a miscellany of nebulous aches and shooting pains, decries the unfamiliarity of the mattress I’ve been sleeping on in this room-across-town that I’m sharing with my brothers, whose early movements are my alarm. A text message this morning from my “higher-ups” read, “no one leaves the house today ” – a mandate which was followed in spirit rather than letter.

Reports home tend to include the sentence “I’m fine,” surrounded by a lot of obscure phrases about what I know or don’t know about the political situation that has undoubtedly been analyzed to death by news anchors who are paid to string words they haven’t thought about into sentences they don’t fully understand. And who could understand it, anyway? Perhaps the best ones at least know what it is that they don’t know.

Once every few hours a phone call comes in from some source outside, and the caller’s information is passed around to all of the inhabitants (we are not alone, my brothers and I). The seven-foot walls of this little sanctuary are our primary protection from the activities in the streets, which so far have included an eager vegetable vendor and the mechanics who eat breakfast at the bean stand on the corner. Gut-wrenching drama, it is not.

The phone calls tell us mostly the types of things we could guess on our own: sometime today, there will be a march downtown, and probably chanting. Or: Government officials are going to have a meeting. Yes, I bet they will. The calls tell us most when they tell us nothing because it means that nothing has happened yet, and as the hours roll by I find myself expecting something more like a glacier than an avalanche. Still, speculations of any kind are fairly worthless right now – at least any of the speculations that I could make. The most hopeful news is that the best possible outcomes still seem just as likely as anything else.

I tend to see all of the suffering – the starvation, disease, and destitution of this place – in one of two ways. The first says that no Ending could ever be good enough to make reparation for the suffering of these little ones. The second says that there must be such an Ending for their suffering demands it. It is by the great Hope of this second perspective that I find myself so often with my eyes closed, measuring out my breathing like the long strides of a distance runner, and praying, finally, words which were holy long before I knew them. He has filled the hungry with good things.

Captain