Plans Change

I have become the priest I thought I would never be, the one who does not do what other priests will do.  I always prided myself on doing what the more orthodox priests preferred not to do.  I would work with people on the periphery of the rules, the ones on the outer edges of religious practice, the unorthodox. I was accommodating.  The virus and fear has changed me, but I hope it is opening up something new that is yet to appear.  I am among the old, and have had pneumonia twice in this century.  So I avoid crowds, ceremonies, groups of people.  That is, I don’t do the weddings, funerals, big ceremonies to which I used to say “yes.”  I have become the guy who does not accommodate.  I am uneasy with this at the moment.  I will go off to the monastery soon and be in quarantine because they are in lockdown mode.  Their youngest monk is almost 70.  In quarantine, I won’t have access to Wi-Fi.  I don’t know if my blog will show up in your email or my blogspot.  Certainly it will not be on Facebook unless I put it there using Wi-Fi.  So soon, I will disappear for a couple of weeks, into silence and stillness.  When quarantine is over, I may have discovered something about myself that will put me onto some other path even in my senior years.  So don’t be expecting return phone calls, emails, and requests to do this and that.  And skip messenger.  I never use it.  Until then.