I sit outside on my porch this morning, too cool for just a jacket but too lovely not to partake in the sunshine. My small pots of pansies and herbs sway in the breeze. I hear birds, more than normal in the City (I can’t decide if they have moved back to the City after their own suburban flight due to a calmer, less frenetic City these days, or if I can simply hear them better with the dearth of traffic). A slight hint of marijuana in the air, I know I am at home, in Baltimore.

Yet today and all of this week reminds us we are not home. Home is elsewhere. Perhaps April 11, 2020 is a smidge, an inkling of the Holy Saturday. Quiet, perhaps both peaceful and fully mournful at the same time, with the expectation of something better, hopefully soon but possibly not.

City life is more transient, and I’ve learned in this year and a half of living in the City that making connections is harder, especially in your 50s when there is no local school concerns to tie families together. I admit too that making connections in a new parish seem harder as well. Then again, my timeline is and has historically been not the same as others. With age and effort my timeline has softened and mellowed. But you can’t beat my nature out of me, and I will always push to move things along. This Holy Saturday, more than any other, pushes back on me.

There are blessings–family who are well for now, work that is busy for now, and exercise that has been lifegiving for now. I’ll let you know when my Crossfit Studio, a/k/a the dining room, is getting old. As for the future, of course, that is unknown. Next week I launch my new business website, and hope there will be business. I will, and we all will, pick up where we left off: on consistent calls, grateful for work but at a loss how to solve all the issues, and trying not to clean out the refrigerator, or perhaps, dare I say, the wine bottle.

But for today, Holy Saturday, we pause, in a different way perhaps than we’ve been forced to pause this past month. We wait. We expect. We hope.

This will end. We don’t know precisely when. We do know things won’t be the same. How can we fashion that as as good thing? It can be done.

Pause, at His feet, and ask how. Then listen.