Yesterday was bound to be a strange day. Maundy Thursday has never been my favorite day of the Christian calendar, although there have been some memorable experiences, so that I'm usually open to the idea of Maundy Thursday meaning.
As a child, I loved seeing the altar stripped. In the 70's churches of my childhood, the altar was always--always--hidden underneath paraments. It was always a shock to see the naked altar. I've been to foot washing events and Maundy Thursday worship experiences that resembled a meal more than a church service.
I knew that last night would be different, but that it would be similar to the live stream of our Sunday service: our pastor, a smaller version of the choir sitting very far apart, and me, the person who changes camera angles from an iPad.
We got to church early so that my spouse could rehearse with the choir. Since we're now under a face mask order, I brought some cloth with me. I transformed cloth that I had originally bought for baby quilts. I stitched by hand as the choir rehearsed songs that took them from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter.
It was surreal in so many ways. Part of me is still aghast that I am stitching masks; has society really come to this? I felt both like a 19th century seamstress and a character in some strange apocalyptic novel. I thought about shrouds and grave cloths and masks of all sorts. One of my friends in the choir suggested bringing the sides together to make the mask more puffy and less claustrophobic:
This morning was strange too, as I moved through the streets before dawn. Usually lots of folks are walking their dogs. Today I saw no one walking dogs. It's like some strange rapture: the dogs go to Heaven, all the toilet paper disappears, I look out my office window to see no traffic, no sign of any kind of human life.
Could I make some sort of poem out of it all? Perhaps.
I've had a strange roughness in my throat. If I talk too much I want to cough. It's sort of a dry cough, but it comes and goes and some hours, I feel perfectly normal. I took my temperature the other night, when the dry cough first showed up, just to be sure, and I have no fever.
Some days, a cough is just a cough caused by allergies or too much cleaning product or a voice that's tired of performing.
The other day I came up with some lines, a la Eliot's Prufrock, that seem like a perfect way of closing a Good Friday blog post:
I have heard the roosters crowing, each to each.
They crow for all of us.
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