1. Debbie, the technician, walked me through a small maze of short hallways at the Johns Hopkins Community Physicians Heart Center in Silver Spring to a room with a bed and a machine and once I removed my shirt, she got underway taking pictures of my heart and in about twenty minutes, I had had my first echocardiogram. If you happen to be keeping score at home, I return to the Heart Center in Silver Spring on Thursday, Oeact. 9th for an echo stress test and then I will have finished all the tests, for now, to determine my fitness for a kidney transplant. Until I have the transplant, I will return once a year for these heart tests. That's fine. I'll see my kidney doctor every three months. No problem. I'll have blood drawn and sent to Baltimore once a month. That's A Okay. This is my life now, as I'm sure many of you with chronic illnesses understand, illness is one other way to measure time in our lives. We deal.
2. I returned to Thai Taste by Kob after the echocardiogram, eager to try a new appetizer and a different soup. I started with four shrimp dumplings -- and it was a fine choice. The steamed wonton skins were stuffed with ground shrimp, chicken, and pork, water chestnuts, and spices with a small bowl of a sweet and tangy soy sauce topped with crushed peanuts. Then my bowl of Nam Tak Moo, a dark pork broth packed with sliced pork, pork balls, crispy pork skin along with broccoli, cilantro, preserved cabbage, scallions, bean sprouts, a variety of herbs, and, my chosen noodle, vermicelli. When the soup arrived, I breathed in its complex aroma, nearly ready to stop there and spend lunch enjoying its smells alone, but I dived in and enjoyed soup heaven for the next ten or fifteen minutes or so.
3. This is fact, not a complaint. I'm doing fine with this. So far, living in Greenbelt, my day to day life is what the existentialists explore all of life to be, at its most fundamental level: we are strangers. Right now, except in my apartment home, I am a stranger wherever I go. I think some cashiers at the Co-op recognize me, but socially we are strangers to one another and when I go to Target or Greenbelt Lake or College Park or ride the bus or train or go anywhere else, I am a stranger. The same is true at church, so far. I am a stranger and all the people with whom I share the peace, after we confess our sins, are strangers to me and I to them.
Tonight, I went to the Maunday Thursday service, the most existential service of all. Jesus, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, forsaken, he feels, by God, about to face capital punishment, arrives at another moment in his life when he must come to grips with the meaning of his existence and face the possibility that it is meaningless. He cries out to God like a child.
Tonight, about a dozen congregates, as the service ended, stripped the altar of everything and it sat before us, bare, just as Jesus is stripped bare, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, a stranger, before he is crucified. To me, the essence of the Judeo-Christian experience is experienced in the existential crises we face. Abraham, Moses, David, Mary, Jonah, Job, Paul, biblical character after biblical character, faced these same crises. They had to confront the basic existential questions: What is the meaning of life? Does life have meaning? What is the meaning of my life? When life events call me into account, what's there? Who am I? They, and we/I, often feel estranged in these moments, alienated, alone. They/we/I feel like strangers.
It was the liturgy, the theater of the altar becoming bare and the priests' vestments moving from red to black, the experiencing the existential crisis of Jesus' last hours that made tonight's Maunday Thursday service a time that left me silent and prompted me to continue to wrestle with life's most difficult questions.
The darkest time is yet to come, at noon, at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, on Good Friday.
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