(Un)Mute Yourself, Day 18
Malachi 4.2 | But for you who flatten the curve, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.
Today’s featured contributor is Dr. Vivia Kay Kieswetter. She is an evangelist of glitter, radical hope, and the power of burning it all down to find the beauty in the ashes. She’s disabled, queer, re-connecting with her father’s Indigenous heritage, and usually more joyful than angry. In her twisty path, she has: mucked out stables, tended bar and waitressed in dives and five-star restaurants, served as an event coordinator, a project manager, started social enterprises, conducted choirs and small ensembles, been a professional jazz, reggae, and opera singer, holds two Bachelor’s degrees, two Master’s degrees, a Ph.D., and two professional certificates.
While others are working from their elaborate home offices, I make a daily walk that is exactly 14 steps.
These are the steps that show on my watch which I purchased to encourage walking whenever I walk from my kitchen’s coffeemaker to my sofa where my laptop waits.
And inside the laptop is where everything else waits in 2020.
The doomscrolling.
The supportive group chats.
The seminary.
The church.
The university chapel.
Sometimes it is a movie theatre.
Sometimes it has been a doctor’s office.
What it has never been, not even once, in the year of our Lord 2020, is enough.
I have diminished in the year that my world got smaller. Gotten quieter. My face has shrunk to the portion that peeks out from above a mask. My energy has diminished to an errand a day before I retreat back to return to the world of 14 steps.
In Advent I made a contract, but not with God. I made a contract with the sun. I told the sun that here where I live where the sun hardly shows their radiant face in winter that every day that the sun came out in Advent, I would go outside. I would push my creaky bones and frozen joints slowly outside, wrapped in swaddling clothes and parka, and go see the sun.
I have never regretted a pledge more.
I have broken this promise, this pledge to the sun, several times.
On other days I take the surliest walks possible.
Begrudgingly throwing my winter coat and hat on unrepentantly over my capri pant toddler-grandma chic-flowered pajamas sets with my rain boots on in a clash of seasons, daring the sun and the inspirational watch to judge me.
Here am I, I say to the sun. I double-dog-dare you to try to cheer me. This is the covid-times, the year that joy went underground and everything is in my laptop and everything is fictional and nothing matters and people are dying so my steps that I thought I would count don’t matter anymore.
If I’m being honest, the sun, I would love to stay in bed every day because I am tired of the cruelty I see in the doomscroll machine when it isn’t the seminary machine or the work meeting machine or the pain clinic machine or the library reading machine. I am not hopeless sun, I am just empty and I am tired of doing the right things when so many people are callous and hateful and think they can have a toxically masculine fistfight with — a virus.
Take that, sun. You are too bright and too big and the world is too bright and too big and I am too small and too sad.
Because this is the world without Eucharist and without hugs and without being able to visit the sick and without singing in church and I hate it and I hate you too, the sun because you remind me of joy and frolicking.
And then the anger that is covering up my sorrow starts to de-thaw and it happens. What, without knowing it, I have really been longing for — longing for as the deer longs for water:
One tear wells up out of my rage, and then another.
After those more come until I am crying in torrents and sobbing and gasping for air as I unlock the door of my apartment and go and take the steps to the kitchen and sit on the cold tiles by the coffeemaker and sob for who knows how long because time is so different right now.
I can’t do anything the way that I can touch.
In the depths of this, I cried myself out.
I sit on the floor, no longer angry.
I think of communion linens, rinsed clean after service, feel my hands on their softness in the warm water, wringing them out and hanging them up —
feel the promise of doing this again.
I bow my head:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Then I can take the 14 steps again.
“Also, it would be okay with me if it could rain tomorrow. Amen.”
And then I can open my world again.
