Transplanting and Sustaining: Covid-19 Special Issue

Word Made Flesh
Raquel Sequiera
Roman Holiday
Sharla Moody
“It has something to do with incarnation…” [1]
Something to do with feeling the perfect spiral when
the ball leaves your hand, before you see its spin
against the fiery dusk;
with launching into a stride with the dregs of strength
from straining muscles;
with the shimmering sound of harmony;
with sweet gut laughter at texts from friends you hadn’t
thought to miss;
something to do with insomnia and the nights your
body goes on strike;
with yearnings only poetry can fill... nope, only deepen;
and something to do with the pain of a hug rebuffed
by a regretful elbow.
(Remember when we called them crazy—the ones
who said viruses were incarnate?)
This mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible
incorruption,
but the mortal and corruptible come first:
A trail of blood in the Israelites’ wake, a trail of pride
in mine, and a trail of contact turned contagion,
while we wonder with each sacrifice, each quarrel,
each outbreak, if this is the day that mercy runs out.
Still, they say, in the twinkling of an eye—
like the first morning light and your bleary smile before
you bury your head in another hour of sleep;
like the thrill of a beloved voice, even in a dream;
like catching your breath at the thought of existence
and love and the word made flesh—
in a moment like that, we shall all be changed.
I thought it took three days.
[1] Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, page 66
My brother and I have a ritual: Every
night that we are home together, and
able, we watch a movie. In the span of
the past few weeks, we have watched
more films than ever before. Our list
is rather eclectic, but we watch more
good ones than bad, and we get to
maintain one of the joys of human
experience together––that is, appreciating
good art.
Recently we watched the film Roman
Holiday, a 1953 romance directed by
the always sublime William Wyler, and
starring two of the most beautiful and
talented people to ever grace the silver
screen, Gregory Peck and, in her Hollywood
debut, Audrey Hepburn. As the
title suggests, the movie is set in Rome
and follows the encounters between an
American reporter, Joe (Peck), and the
crown Princess Ann (Hepburn) of an
unnamed country who is in Rome for
diplomacy business. It is a movie about
beginnings and endings, and the brief
time between that sustains the most
powerful of emotions and tenderest
of loves, and the sense of togetherness
and apartness that define the highs and
lows, the joys and sorrows, the yearnings
and reliefs, that comprise this life.
I have been thinking about arrivals
and departures and the time spent
between more now in the past several
weeks. It has been rather hard not
to view the current events unfolding
without resentment and grief that
life has been interrupted and we are
seemingly suspended in hazy limbo,
waiting. We take snapshots of our
lives, memories that we keep in boxes
to pull out on certain occasions, and
mentally looking through this year’s
album fills me with ill-fated yearning
and anger. There’s this sense that everything
that happened this year was
a waste if it ended too soon; if the
play you were supposed to star in got
postponed, if nothing quite happened
with your campus crush, if all the cover
letters you slaved over yielded only
cancelled internships, acquaintances-turned-budding-friends
that are put
on pause until fall, then it would have
been better that these things had never
happened at all. What are these if not
reminders of things, time, people, experiences
lost?
Roman Holiday is conscious of its
timeline: the princess is only in town
for a few days, and the reporter knows
this. And yet they fall in love, dizzyingly
and recklessly fast, as they approach
the end flashing ahead in clear view. I
wonder how they felt, diving into this
new, precarious beginning and knowing
the heartache that likely waited
at the end of their ever so temporary
time together. And I wonder whether
I would have chosen not to pursue
the wonderful things that I did if I
had known how they would end and
how I would at times feel about their
endings. And, on Good Friday, we recognize
the worst ending in the history
of the cosmos: our Lord, Jesus Christ,
giving himself in complete humiliation
to be crucified for the sake of a crowd
that utterly rejects him.
And yet, every ending is also a beginning,
as unthinkable as it may be in
the first moments of experience. The
COVID-19 outbreak ushered in a new
time of isolation, of family, of anxiety,
and shifts in governance, public health,
and economics will likely be attributed
to the pandemic. Perhaps for the
last time, I am spending months with
my parents and brother, who will be
graduating from college, all under the
same roof and enjoying good art together.
Though Roman Holiday does
not show us an “after,” it is not difficult
to imagine one for Joe and Ann. And,
thankfully, Good Friday is not the ultimate
end, but simply the beginning of
a time of mourning, a time of mystery,
before the greatest, most joyous occasion
to ever occur in all the myriads
of galaxies. And so, while we wait in
this limbo with the hope of a happy
end, we celebrate Easter, the ending
of our struggle and the beginning of
our redemptions through the precious
blood of Christ. For everything there
is a season, a time to be born, a time
to die, and the briefest of moments
between. Yet even that ending is not
truly the end, for we have faith that we
will wake in a perfect beginning with
no end.
.
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