Musings;
It got to 43 degrees around where we live yesterday. This is a part of the world where relatively few people have air conditioning. 43 degrees celsius is almost 110 fahrenheit.
We are among those without air conditioning.
Last night we took our cat for a drive just to let him cool down in the air conditioned car.
Seeing a Movie After the Apocalypse
Jennifer and I decided that we would try to avoid the worst two and a half hours of the heat wave by going to a movie. We purchased tickets online and selected reserved seats. There were few seats left at the time. However, when we got to the theatre, bought our snacks and proceeded to Cinema #9, something seemed amiss. We were the only two in the cinema. No ads were running on the screen. We commented that this must be what it is like to see movies after a pandemic. Once the start time of the movie had passed Jen went to find someone to see what was up.
“Oh no!” said the manager that Jen spoke with. “How did you get into the cinema? Everyone who bought tickets received refunds. The HVAC in the projector room for that cinema broke down. We can’t show the movie.”
We got our refund and some free apology tickets, and left with our popcorn and Coke. (We never buy Coke, but post-pandemic it was the only drink that was available at the concession. The person serving us said unironically, “You can choose from any of these drinks” running her hand in front of a display containing many bottles of only Coke.)
Learning To Pray
When I was the pastor of a church that had a building, the building brought some blessing, but also brought a great burden of care and a lot of concern about the future.
Vancouver had the famous “leaky condo” problem for years. Many buildings around the city had to have the building envelope repaired, usually at huge cost and inconvenience for owners. Our church building required such repair and the engineering report when it came back included numbers like (as I recall) $450,000 for just one wall, and over a million (with costs increasing quickly if work left undone) for other walls.
I also remember the feeling of living in a townhouse complex where special levies for major repair ran around $40,000 per unit. It is easy to simply hope that problems can be ignored without major financial cost or negative consequence.
Situations like this can be a kind of spiritual metaphor.
We can avoid the hard realities of our life or character or need for growth, sometimes hoping that things will just stay the same or just get better by no agency of our own.
We can act as if wishful thinking or merely “thoughts and prayers” might allow us to deny the reality of a situation.
Hearing about the news story of the condominium collapse in Florida, I was moved to be mindful of the various people involved and how interaction, true recognition of the humanity of another person, can become prayer. As of this writing, 11 people are confirmed dead and 151 are unaccounted for. This morning the New York Times ran a story on how it was known for some time that there were structural problems with the building. The president of the condominium council wrote a letter to the owners and residents detailing the major repairs needed. Reading the letter after the building has fallen proves somewhat chilling. As I read it I thought of the people who received it, the woman who wrote it, and the engineers named.
The letter outlines that approximately 16 million dollars of repair work was needed, mostly to repair dangerous concrete deterioration. Below is just a small section:
This morning, I prayed:
Dear God, teach me to pray;
For the woman who wrote this letter (and those like her) who take on such huge responsibility often for little or no financial compensation. I pray for those who share bad news with others, and are called upon to help others to face difficult news and the implications.
For the people who received the letter. For those who argued against the need for repairs (there must have been some of those). For those who worried about how to come up with the money for a large special levy. For those who read the letter and spent hours worrying about the financial implications. For those who read the letter and did not survive the collapse.
For the people who did the work to assess the structural needs. Rarely do we look forward to hearing engineering reports if we are owners, residents or managers of a building or a project. Bless those people who do such work. Grant them compassion for those who hear their words. Help people like me to appreciate people like them.
For those working now in the aftermath. Grant your strength to people working at the scene of the collapse, and to local political and community leaders.
For those who live in similar situations. For those who live near that building in buildings of similar age. For those in other parts of the world facing the reality of such engineering reports. Grant us wisdom.
I pray that we would be aware that people around us may be carrying burdens like those carried in this situation. How ought we to listen to one another? How can we be compassionate when we are often so afraid? How can we consider what might be weighing down the person with whom we are speaking or arguing or disagreeing.
Help us to see that we connect most with our humanity in seeing the humanity of other people.
Dear God, bring us together. Show us your love.
Amen.