Let it be an Ordinary Day

I walked quickly through the hall of taxidermied birds– extant species as well as extinct ones like the dodo, all a bit faded and drab. I didn’t want to think about extinction, not the kind humans caused. I started to go down to the dinosaur exhibit, but there was another atrium and the vertigo came back. I took refuge in an elevator which spit me out in front of the skeleton of a giant prehistoric fish, under moving blue lights that made it look as if the skeleton was swimming.

I walked quickly past two tyrannousaurs frozen in the middle of posturing at one another, under the giant arching neck of a brachiosaurus. These, too, used to be normal; they were living things that roamed the earth, and if they could have contemplated their own condition they couldn’t have imagined anything different. And then the asteroid fell, and they were no more. The earth froze. Their bodies rotted under the ground, their flesh turned to oil, and some of their bones became stone. We dug them up, we brushed them off, reconstructed them, and placed them in museums.

I didn’t want to think about asteroids.

These are the things I fear the most.  I’ve always had a terror stronger than my vertigo at high places, of mass destruction– of anything that wipes out civilizations. Of nuclear holocausts, of wars, of epidemics, climate catastrophes, asteroid that kick up enough dust to blot out the sun. None of these things are science fiction, after all. They happen. Some are more likely to happen than others. Some have gotten much more likely to happen lately.

Lord have mercy. Please, Jesus, not in our time. All you who sought wisdom however you knew how, pray for us. O Wisdom which orders all things far and nigh, have mercy. Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy, keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety. When my inevitable Calvary comes, let it be an ordinary Calvary. When I embrace the Cross for the last time, let it look like a hospital bed, a nursing home, the curb where the driver just didn’t see me,  an accidental fall from something like that terrible atrium with the marble floor below; the atria I keep inside of me, and the ventricles as well, failing to contract in unison. Let it not be mass destruction.

On that day, let someone, somewhere, be having an ordinary day. Let people be shuffling in and out of churches and temples; some to gawk, some to petition for selfish things, and some to pray. Let Wisdom hear their prayer however badly they pray on that day.  Let someone be fiddling with Rosary beads and saying “now and at the hour of our death,” but not thinking about death, and let the prayer be for me.  Let someone be at a museum, gazing at Athena and the Nike of Samothrace and wishing he could touch her but not daring. And let it go on from there: ordinary, uninteresting times for generations to come. A thousand years from now let someone dig up my bones so that others may stare in a museum– I’m not saintly enough for a church or a shrine, just a museum for people to visit for the fun of it. Let them gawk at how small I became when I dried out. Let one soul in a thousand remember to pray for me as they shuffle by, avoiding the atrium. Or better still, let me never be dug up again until You return to raise the dead. Let people walk over my grave on ordinary days, not knowing that I’m there, and I will pray for them. But let there be more time– much, much more time, eons of boring and commonplace everyday time. Lord have mercy. 

Next thing I knew I was in the Hall of Gems.

I’m told that Medieval European depictions of Heaven were full of gems, because flowers and trees are products of time that change with the seasons, but gems remain the same for centuries. Gems were the symbols of beauty that is outside of time, eternal, like Heaven.

Of course, gems are not eternal either. Amber was once sap from a living tree; diamonds were once coal that was itself once a living thing. Once, and now they are dead.

There are so many mirrors in the walls in the hall of gems, I kept turning a corner in between the display cases and unexpectedly staring into my own face– that plain face in my frumpy Sunday afternoon conference-going clothes, among sparkling heaps of gems– then backing away, around the next corner to escape the uncanny experience, and seeing myself once more. Again and again, I found myself.

I found myself in a museum, when I was terribly anxious.