A poem by church member Ellie Stock "I Can't Breathe" Inside the glass a young man says his last goodbye, a phone call to his mother, vigiling outside, a cough and a sneeze now a pandemic disease, soon he is whispering, I can’t breathe — isolated and trapped by a ventilator machine, a masked nurse holds his hand to ease his pain until he dies. Outside the glass a mother says her last goodbye, a phone call to her ailing son inside, eyes burning and red, tears clogging her throat, grieving uncontrollably, I can’t breathe , no one consoling or hearing her cry masked ones walk by as she watches intently his final sigh. Inside the glass a black man says his last goodbye, a video recording to witnesses outside arrest and handcuffing, then a racism disease, soon he is choking, I can’t breathe (12 times) face pinned to the street, neck kneed, lynched by white police while masked witnesses shout for relief until he dies. ...

This very powerful poem written by Wislawa Szymborska is grounded in a gritty sense of realism and yet it far from bleak, as it shifts incrementally from despair to hope. Symborska is a Polish poet who died in 2012 at the age of 88. You can read a short bio of her  here. While the circumstances of her life suggest the war she had in mind in this poem was WWII, the ideas can equally well be applied to this pandemic. (TW) The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall. Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and n...

A very good piece in the Post-Dispatch  by Nassim Benchaabane offering an overview of how houses of worship locally are handled reopening for services. It mentions a couple of our neighbors in the CWE, the Cathedral Basilica and Central Reform Congregation. It’s quite a long piece. Even if you don’t read it in its entirety, be sure you scroll done to the bottom for a beautiful photo essay by Robert Cohen.

If you were wondering what the entrance to 2nd Pres. looks like right now, here is your answer. (Thank you to Mike Willock for the photo)

Tim Woodcock writes: When this pandemic is over – and the death tolls have been tallied, the data crunched and the policies critiqued, and the most incompetent politicians booted from office – only then we will be able to clearly assess the psychological damage it has taken on people. One aspect of this that has been on my mind recently is the way traditional rites of passages have been disrupted. We are already becoming used to births, deaths, and marriages being marked in creative but perhaps not entirely satisfactory ways. While I imagine a birth is much the same mix of chaos and joy for the parents as it has always been, will extended families members be willing to forgo the experience of cooing at a newborn and passing him or her from person to person? And if they do skip that, will the bond created be any less deep? Concepts like a “virtual funeral” – which was almost meaningless six months ago – are starting to take form and become commonplace. But does a virtual funeral ...