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[klsiegel320]

08 April 2004

Holy Cross Monastery

And here we are again, all set to break time that it may be remade. Indeed, the breaking has already begun.

From Matins--as always: Make me to hear of joy and gladness, that the body you have broken may rejoice.

And because this is the year for which the Old Testament lessons in Holy Week are all from Lamentations: Your prophets have seen for you false and deceitful visions; they have not called you to account for your iniquities.

Amen! Lord, it is even so. As the 9/11 commission proceeds, all of us begin to see the truth: that the political prophets to whom the nation gave its ear were seeing for us false and deceitful visions -- that we were only victims, not perpetrators of evil; that the enemy was Evil Personified; that it was just and right for us to go to war against another people and topple their leaders from power.

Also from Lamentations: her children cry to their mothers for bread and wine, as they pour out their life upon their mother's breast.

All this in the wake of the killing of American civilian contractors in Fallujah - killing, maiming, dismembering, and dancing around the bodies. Horrific; disgusting. But we rise up in self-righteous arrogant indignation, call the perpetrators savages, and launch an all-out military reprisal, even stating that "we will pay them back."

And refusing steadfastly to see that we brought this upon them, and upon ourselves, by our own arrogant refusal to see anyone's point of view but ours.

We are the falling Jerusalem, whose former friends pass by and hiss and gnash their teeth. And if we are not mindful, if we do not listen to the true prophets of the age, we will - like Jerusalem - be reduced to ruin.

It is all very disheartening. Very hard to see how we can possibly survive as a nation if this false leader and his false prophets are permitted more time to rule.

And where am I? Less introspective than I've been; it's been in some ways a less intense year, that way. I've been away so much, wandering in foreign places - it seems almost like Lent began right after last Easter.

I still get crazy on occasion; got all cranked up and nervous the last time Don had a follow-up, but for once everything was good.

I think the real struggle is with food and exercise, and that the time has come to engage that battle more directly.

My blood pressure was high-ish at the doctor's office; she's also doing assorted bloodwork to see what else might be going on. Poor lady is as frustrated as I am with the stupid facial hair, and cannot fathom any better than I why it remains when all the hormone levels read normal.

So she prescribed a blood pressure medication; I am going to take it, but I'm also going to do some checking and rearranging of other things first, to see if lifestyle changes will resolve any of it. That and I'd just knocked back a cup of coffee half an hour before I left for the visit, so...it might not be as high as it read at the office.

09 April 2004

Holy Cross Monastery

So, how am I really? Still sad, still lonely - maybe a bit more at ease with solitude than I used to be. Battling depression, battling jadedness, battling a sense that it's all just foolishness. Feeling more than physically cold and hard. Needing the cold shell to be broken so I can get out, get free - which as William traced its origins descends from a word that meant love.

I need to get out to a place where I can - as he says - attach my freedom by great love to God.

I've been so tired, so exhausted - imagine not wanting to get up for vigil, not wanting to get up for Matins - almost oversleeping Matings, even. No fear, just a dullness, a lack of spirit, a fatigued lack of energy. I'd thought it was the crazy hours I'd been keeping and my inability to get enough sleep. I'm starting to think otherwise.

I've also been getting so winded on the stairs! I'm on the third floor, up in the alcove (the half-floor) and getting up and down those steps is painful - physically and emotionally. Because I know I used to be able to do that without that much trouble - tired legs, but not this dragging, exhausted pain.

Hard vigil - hard to be still, hard to listen, hard to just be. Did my best; it will have to be good enough.

It was grey and cloudy and cold, coming out from Matins - the clouds seem to have cleared off and the sun is out.

Sad at the odd place my life is in, still, a year later. If I'm not careful, this could go on indefinitely, and that's not good. And yet I feel powerless, exhausted; I feel I can't gather up the energy to do anything to remedy the situation.

So I hide - I eat, play computer games, read, sleep - anything to hide from the pain. I like the solitude, but hate being lonely. I like the independence, but then again - I come home and feel trapped and closed in.

I'm more and more afraid that this is depression, that I'm maybe not as abjectly miserable as before but that it's still there, lurking, coloring everything with an overtone of grey.

But again - is it chemical or situational? I'm away from home, sharing a car with a not-so-good driver, forced to be away but given nothing to do. All this is surely stress? So - if all that were removed, would the mood improve? I think so...it did improve when there was real work to do. And RP is going away at the end of next week, for two weeks - so that'll be two weeks that I can come and go as I please. Of course, I'm likely to be bummed to be forced to go back to sharing...

There's a lot of anger and frustration, here. I know it's entirely wasteful to let everybody have a car; it's stupid. It's three miles to and from the office, and most days that's all I need to do. But...RP and I are the only ones being forced to do this. Larry, Geoff, Patricia, Jim - all come and go as they please. But RP and I are yoked together like oxen.

And he's not the world's best driver - at times he's downright scary. And because he's working the schedule he is, I can't change mine to get more time at home.

I feel frustrated and trapped and not free. And I always fear that some of my annoyance is coming through, which I don't want. And I'm always a little scared that I'm a racist, that it's prejudice that's causing me to be irritated with him.

Except I guess that's a bit silly, since I'm not irritated because he's Indian, or blaming any of his eccentricities on his ethnicity. I'm annoyed because he's a scary driver, and to some extent because he's a cheapskate - won't get a cell phone because the company won't pay for it, wants a ride to the airport even though they'll pay the expense for a cab.

Not - like three years ago - in agonies, about Don's condition. Strangely indifferent to my own - I don't feel the resentment I felt when he was put on blood pressure medication...I don't seem to feel anything, which is frightening. Either it means I really have no feelings in the matter, or that I'm hiding them.

All we can do is keep swimming. There's no alternate route for this path we walk in these days. The gates have closed behind; the walls on either side too steep and sheer to climb. We can only go forward or be trampled.

And so with the foolish war, that's now a daily blight on the newspapers and radio. The deaths of civilian contractors sparked our vicious retaliation, which is sparking more spreading violence throughout the country. Bush still insists this was the right thing to do, despite all evidence to the contrary. It's becoming clear that he intended this from the beginning, that even before 9/11 he wanted this war.

The words of the Seder - of how ours doors were open to surveillance, how wicked men forced our doors with terror - ring truer than they have.

And we cannot just escape. We have prepared the cross upon which we will be crucified, and we are steadily pursuing that path. We closed the gates to all other options long ago - we have done this crime, and we must pay for it. And we are paying, and we will go on paying - because of one megalomaniac's vision of the world.

later, after the liturgy
It is too much gift - too much to give, a life so good, so noble, for even so many lives that are so mean and bereft of any warming spark of love to return.

Yet he did not consider it too much to give. He looked at those he loved most in the world, who professed to love him more than life itself - and saw a betrayer, a deny-er; saw scattered, fearful sheep running to get as far from what was happening as possible, lest they be asked too directly and too soon for their taste to take up a cross and follow.

He chose - he could have denied himself, denied who and what he was; he didn't have to go through all that. But where would we be, if he had - if the teachings were just teachings, if we never knew the resurrection that follows this most awful death?

There would be no hope. When it all comes crashing down around us, we would have nothing to which to lift our eyes, to fling a rope around and pull ourselves up to. No reason to think other than that the darkness is permanent and endless.

There's so much we can live without - but not hope. If we lose hope, if we fall into the pit of despair and truly believe it has closed its mouth on us forever, we cannot live. I cannot live. Even if the hope seems foolish or even vain to others, still I cannot live without it.

Struggling with either a migraine or sinus headache; took some Sudafed Nighttime for good measure and hoping to drop off soon. The one thing I cannot be is sick, right now - I just do not have time to be.

10 April 2004

Holy Cross Monastery

Substantially improved! I got more or less eight hours - I kept waking up, but was able to get right back to sleep.

It's a lovely morning, clear but cold - but bright and sunny. According to yesterday's paper, a front is supposed to move through and dump several inches of steady rain, starting late tonight into the morning. I'm hoping it stalls somewhere; it's always a little disappointing when Easter is grey.

Strange dream - I was wandering in a strange city, looking for a laundromat, and stumbled into an alley. I heard voices and went toward them, and a man was arguing with his girlfriend, then stabbed her in the mouth. He saw that I had seen, and told me he was going to kill me, too - I said he didn't need to, that I wouldn't say anything, and he asked if I was kidding, that killing her had been hard enough without having to do time for it, and that killing me was easy. Just then the JAG Admiral walked up - the man was known to him, and he apparently didn't know the man was a murderer (the body had vanished). So he stopped the killing inadvertently, and was going to show me where the laundry was because he knew where I'd gotten lost. I managed to get him alone and told him what I had seen, and begged his protection. At first he didn't believe me and thought I must surely be mistaken, but I insisted and finally he believed me and promised to protect me - which is about when I woke up.

...Meanwhile, the silence is getting to us - we're all sitting here at the breakfast table fighting the giggles - DH is playing with a hard-boiled egg, tapping it on his head as if to crack it...you'd have to be here, it doesn't work on paper, but the littlest ting seems to give us the giggles. The brothers say that happens about halfway through Long Retreat, for them: ten days in silence (eep!). C says along about the third day or so, somebody motions for the salt to be passed and everybody starts laughing hysterically.

I'm always interested what things spring up at me; last year it was mostly Thursday and Sunday, and Friday was very subdued. This year it was some Friday and already this morning - Be still, then, and know that I am God. That seems to be the answer to the chorus of "but's" that crops up - over literal, factual things, of all things, after all this time. Some little doubting Thomas corner of my mind saying, "But how do we know Jesus is really Son of God, really Messiah?"

And God says, "Just be still, and know. Quiet the questions; just be still and know."

But how? came the frantic wail from the part of me too well-versed in Western science, where everything must be provable by factual evidence. And the only answer is: Be still, and know.

Amazing - it is seven years I've been doing this now; nine that I've been coming to the monastery; six times in those seven years that I've been here for Triduum: the first two with Robb; then the year I couldn't be here; then four now in turn. Things change and yet stay so the same that I can't separate the years without going back to look - which year did KT sing the Reproaches? And whicd was the time B almost caught fire at Vigil - for real? Which year were we inside because of rain, and which year did we sit and sing Bible camp songs all morning on Easter?

It's like what coming home for Easter should be - full of warmth and light and love and family. Almost time to go help with the breakfast dishes.

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Sorry...tried to include an image but it didn't work. If anybody can tell me where I could store a regular image (as opposed to an icon-sized image) for linking to the LJ page, I'd appreciate it. It's a kind of prettified graphic version I made of the Easter acclamation, which was pretty much all it seems appropriate to say about Easter at the time...