Pastor's Corner, September 2020: "We take care of each other"

At the start of August, I spent a week in Ocean City, NJ. In this pandemic, uprising summer, it was a much-needed respite - a chance to poke my head, turtle-like, out of the shell of my house. A chance to take a week off from reading the news. A chance to breathe. A chance to be with people I love.

In a pandemic summer, that doesn’t come without risk. Cathy and I shared the first floor of a house with a few friends - in a town that’s a people-magnet when the weather is hot. We felt confident about sharing the space with our friends, but less certain about what it would be like to sit on the beach. But a change of scenery was enticing enough that it seemed worth making the trip even if we decided to stay in the house all week.

We didn’t need to stay inside. Except for during the tornado warning, but that’s a different story. People were out on the beach, indulging their bodies’ hunger for sunlight and salt air, and largely indulging their cheeks’ desires for maskless freedom. But there was plenty of space for people to spread out, and everyone seemed to be mindful of the distance.

One enduring image: a group near us with their chairs circled up so they could see each other as they baked and chatted. The adults keeping an eye on the kids, but generally letting them entertain themselves and work out all their wiggly excited energy. The spindly little wire of a boy, running full-tilt from the circle down to the water and back again. That same spindly little wire running partway to the water, stopping cold and turning around to look back at the circle. Throwing his arms in the air, exultant, yelling in singsong back to his people: “We take care of each other!”

It’s the quote of the summer - goad, aspiration, mantra. We take care of each other. Which, of course, on a broad national scale and in so many ways, we have not done and are not doing. And yet, a child’s full-throated cry hangs shimmering in the air. It is the ethos of uprising. The pandemic survival plan. The living impulse of justice. The ligaments of community. We take care of each other.