Eric Attica
The time of year when growth and death Together bloom in abject breath When teardrops nourish rusted leaves And fresh hope soars on withered wings When silent innocence expires And making camp means setting fire. Yet scorched remains of ashen times Are tender starts to second tries That seem, in future memory, The priceless griefs of autumn spring.
A poem about decisions, regrets, and letting go. ∎
Life update: I have COVID-19.
I found out last Thursday, after I started getting the typical symptoms: headache, sore throat. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been a breakthrough infection, so I got tested at the university, and it came back positive.
After two phases of lockdown in Denmark over the course of a year, and after having been vaccinated, I had all but banished the possibility of another lockdown or quarantine from my mind. Such did not prove to be the case. Over the past couple days, I’ve been attending classes and working from here while still waiting to see the outside world. I suppose it borders on cliché to comment on how miraculous that is–twenty years ago, I’d be doing nothing but watching VHS tapes on a low-definition TV.
To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d share a bit from an 1353 work of Italian literature, The Decameron, which is about ten young adults who run away from the city during the Black Death and tell stories to one another to pass the time. Plague seems to be the topic of the zeitgeist, and there’s something fascinating about reading contemporary attitudes about one of history’s deadliest plagues and seeing people newly discover things we take for granted with modern germ theory.
“This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them seemed to communicate this very disease to the person involved.
“What I am about to say is incredible to hear, and if I and others had not witnessed it with our own eyes, I should not dare believe it (let alone write about it), no matter how trustworthy a person I might have heard it from. Let me say, then, that the plague described here was of such virulence in spreading from one person to another that not only did it pass from one man to the next, but, what’s more, it was often transmitted from the garments of a sick or dead man to animals that not only became contaminated by the disease but also died within a brief period of time. My own eyes, as I said earlier, were witness to such a thing one day: when the rags of a poor man who died of this disease were thrown into the public street, two pigs came upon them, and…took the rags and shook them around; and within a short time, after a number of convulsions, both pigs fell dead upon the ill-fated rugs, as if they had been poisoned.”
Even more fascinating are the diverse and extreme reactions to the plague. “…almost all of [those who remained alive] took a very cruel attitude in the matter; that is, they completely avoided the sick and their possessions, and in so doing, each one believed that he was protecting his own good health.” Others “thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else…eating the most delicate of foods and drinking the finest of wines (doing so always in moderation), allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and the dead outside.” Still others “believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing, and making light of everything that had happened was the best medicine for such a disease…This they were able to do easily, for everyone felt he was doomed to die and, as a result, abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if he were their rightful owner.” In any case “the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human, had fallen and almost completely disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick or so short of help that it was impossible for them to fulfill their duties; as a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.”
Makes me a little more grateful that, despite everything that’s happened this year, from infections to rejections to armed insurrections, at least civilization as we know it hasn’t collapsed. ∎
Cover photo: A display at the BYU Museum of Art, which I visited not long before falling ill.
From the outside, the evangelical Protestant church in Draper, Utah, did not look much like the churches I was accustomed to. For one thing, it lacked a steeple; its squat square shape would have been more reminiscent of a doctor’s office or company headquarters, if it were not for the large lettering on the side that proclaimed the building as “The Rock Church” in a modern sans-serif, beside a logo made up of the letter R and a stylized cross. The building’s foyer seemed to me a hybrid of a movie theater and a sports arena, and I wandered for a few moments, lost, finding my bearings.
Unbeknownst to the relaxed churchgoers all around me, the redhead in the colored button-up shirt standing between the sound booth and the plates of bread and wine had intruded into a completely unfamiliar world. Not knowing whether the large auditorium should be treated more like the traditional chapels I was familiar with or the Plain White T’s concert I had attended when I was thirteen, I settled for sitting quietly on the third row and observing those around me as they wandered in, trusting the principle that one can learn much about an event from the faces of those in attendance. Outside, friends had greeted one another warmly and chatted excitedly on the sidewalk, evincing a level of familiarity to which I was an outsider. After the countdown on the giant television screens reached zero and the band invited us to stand as they launched into their first piece, I looked around and noted the reactions of others in the congregation. Most swayed back and forth gently, several waving an arm in the air as they felt the music (a welcomingly familiar emotion given my own background as a musician), some sipping coffee and talking quietly to one another.
Indeed, as the service continued, I noticed more and more features that stood in defiance of traditional fixtures of worship, the first being the time-honored relationship between volume and reverence. The symbols of priesthood and authority were likewise absent, and I was at a loss for what title to apply to the man who spoke to the congregation between songs. Was he the pastor? A priest? The lead singer? Categories that I had accepted as either sacred or secular were blurred and combined, and nowhere was this more evident than during communion, which followed after the initial band performance of about half an hour. The guitarist remained on stage, playing a simple, atmospheric line with a contemplative, pleasant, and ethereal mood as the traditional bread and wine were distributed. Then a man (whom I realized was the actual pastor) said a rhythmic prayer from the stage, not like the chopped melodic line of a Lutheran priest during mass, but rather like the accompanied recitation of a poem, a spoken petition to God that seemed magnified, enhanced, and even answered by the peace of the background melody.
The explanation for this redefinition of sacred categories came in the pastor’s sermon. He displayed an image of a hippie bus on the screens (“Not the real bus,” he commented, “I just looked up ‘old bus’”) and narrated how a group of “Jesus hippies” drove from campus to campus and preached in the 1960s and 70s. The pastor’s father encountered them, converted to Christianity, studied as a pastor, and “planted” a church that led to the founding of over 30 more churches, including The Rock. The point, this second-generation pastor explained, is that “God is on the move,” and He can use whatever he wants for the gospel’s sake. With that explanation, suddenly the hippie bus was more than a Google Images stock photo—it was a sacred object. And suddenly, the presence of all the accoutrements of a contemporary rock band in a church was no longer so strange. The pastor’s words carried far beyond a hippie bus; if God is on the move and uses anything and everything for the gospel’s sake, then that also included, in this particular instance, two guitars, one keyboard synth, one drum set, and one full sound crew.
The band closed the service with an energetic piece that took its refrain from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…” though it was a different lyric that remained with me long after the service had ended: “Taste of His goodness / Find what you’re looking for.” Those words of John 3:16, that God so loved the world that He gave His son, have spread in innumerable ways since the first century—they have been read with wonder in Roman villa house-churches, recited in Latin from pulpits ornamented and plain, copied by the pens of countless monks, printed in ink by Gutenberg’s press, carried by missionaries to unknown lands, publicly proclaimed by itinerant preachers, sung from a millennium of hymnals. In The Rock Church, the twenty-first century’s new collection of sacred objects was on full display in all its aural amplitude, and the peaceful chatter of the congregation testified that among the fold-up chairs, the electronic buzz of amped-up guitars, the tithing box labeled with a Venmo address, and the aftertaste of timeless sacramental wine, this diverse group of worshippers had found what they were looking for. ∎
This article was written for a humanities course at BYU. I anticipate writing a series of articles about different events in the community.