Solidarity

My classroom on Thursday,
prepped for social distancing Monday,
and now empty.

On Thursday, the last day of classes before the province-wide school shut-down in efforts to help plank the Covid19 pandemic, I’m in the school chapel at 2:00 p.m.  Alone.   I have my phone, and my rosary.  I’m wondering why I’m here.  Yes, an email I noticed by chance  a few minutes before reminding people to pray the rosary with Pope Francis at 2:00 did prod me.   And yes, my inner voice said, Why not go?  No excuses—I had just enough time before two pm; I had finished my work; the chapel was close by.  I even had the  rosary I had brought for  the prayer table.

Since September, I’ve been in a high school, drafted by the school division to help out in a pinch in the French Immersion department.  Life since then has been streamlined, to put it mildly, narrowed, to be realistic, the multiple driving lanes of my world reduced to one—school work.  This blog has been only one of the casualties. 

That’s why I was in a high school on Thursday. What took me to the chapel, rosary in hand, is more complicated to explain.  I’m not devoted to the rosary.  In fact, I wonder if I’ve ever said the rosary by myself in my life ever before.  I’ve prayed the rosary in church during various rites, and at home, with my parents off and on while they lived with us in their last years.  But alone?  No.  To me, the rosary has always been a communal devotion, something you do with others as a ritual.

So why, then, am I here, in a chapel, alone, with a rosary?  To pray for healing? For protection?  I’d have to say no, although the spirits of my children and grandchildren surround me in that space.    If not to pray for, then surely to pray alongside people all over the world.   To feel connected in my solitude to millions of others all over the world joined with Pope Francis to find strength in prayer and in each other in their own solitude.  

A need for solidarity took me to the chapel that Thursday.  The same sense of solidarity that moves me to distance myself from others, to wash my hands until the knuckles bleed, to stay home to protect those I love, as well as well as the medical professionals, the retailers, the maintenance people,  who keep society going.   Add to the list those who, like me, do their best to stay calm and carry on, one hour at a time, to get through this pandemic.

In that stillness and solidarity, as the Hail Marys slip by, a centering mantra, I think of a suggestion I’ve posted online for my history class.  Students are living history that they will share with their children and grandchildren.  They will read accounts of this period throughout their lives.  Why not, then, add their voice to the record? Journal, take photographs, talk to people, during the months to come, as their recorded experience of the pandemic will be primary source historical documents in the future. I do really need to walk the talk, to chronicle my own experience,  as well, in this space.   

After the last Glory be to the Father, I feel calm, settled, with a sense of purpose and an ironic gratitude that such a tragic event has opened up space in my recent life to reflect.  Here goes.