Episode transcript: season one, episode 3: Burning bush // Wednesday, March 19, 2020
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Welcome to Shelter in Place, a podcast about finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. Coming to you from Oakland, California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
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You will have to decide
if you want this—
want the blessing
that comes to you
on an ordinary day
when you are minding
your own path,
bent on the task before you
that you have done
a hundred times,
a thousand.
You will have to choose
for yourself
whether you will attend
to the signs,
whether you will open your eyes
to the searing light, the heat,
whether you will open
your ears, your heart
to the voice
that knows your name,
that tells you this place
where you stand—
this ground so familiar
and therefore unregarded—
is, in fact,
holy.
You will have to discern
whether you have
defenses enough
to rebuff the call,
excuses sufficient
to withstand the pull
of what blazes before you;
whether you will
hide your face,
will turn away
back toward—
what, exactly?
No path from here
could ever be
ordinary again,
could ever become
unstrange to you
whose seeing
has been scorched
beyond all salving.
You will know your path
not by how it shines
before you
but by how it burns
within you,
leaving you whole
as you go from here
blazing with
your inarticulate,
your inescapable
yes.
I came across this poem by Jan Richardson a few days ago. It felt so appropriate to the times that I wondered if she’d written it just this week. I’d skimmed over the title, and when I went back and looked at it, I realized it wasn’t, in fact, a poem about this strange time we are living in, but about the old Bible story of Moses and his burning bush.
For those of you not familiar, the story of the burning bush comes to us from the Book of Exodus, the second book of both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible. When I looked up the passage for myself, I realized that Moses was 80 years old when he encountered God in this burning bush, telling him to go to Egypt and set the Israelites free from slavery. Only today, reading this poem, does it strike me how hard that must have been for him. It had been forty years since he’d moved away from Egypt. I bet he’d gotten pretty used to his way of life. He probably wasn’t looking to uproot his entire life and take on a new project he hadn’t gone looking for.
Moses makes all kinds of excuses about why he’s not fit for the job. He’s no good at public speaking, and this new life is going to require a lot of that. He’s got a record. He killed someone in Egypt, which is why he left in the first place.
But in the end, he goes. Faced with a burning bush that talks, maybe he felt like he had no other choice. And eventually, after a bunch of truly awful plagues, it pays off. The slaves are set free. Good triumphs over evil, at least until the next big crisis.
Maybe it’s a stretch, but when I read that poem about Moses, I think about our country’s healthcare professionals.
Some of my closest friends here in Oakland are doctors and nurses. My husband and I both have doctors and nurses in our extended families. When we ask them about COVID-19, they say that it’s just a matter of time before they’re exposed.
Yesterday morning I woke up to a text from my sister-in-law Joyce, who is an infectious disease doc in Wisconsin. She was concerned that she’d been exposed and gotten the virus. Test results would come back within 24 hours, but in the meantime, we all waited anxiously. My parents and grandmother, who are in their seventies and nineties respectively, live with Joyce, my brother, and their kids. There was a lot of discussion in the family about what should be done, if my parents and grandmother should flee to Minnesota to live with my sister for a while. Even if Joyce’s test results come back negative, my brother worried that if they didn’t leave now, they wouldn’t be able to. It’s only a matter of time before the Shelter in Place mandate extends to the rest of the country, he said.
If you go into most specialties in medicine, you expect a certain amount of suffering. Certainly long hours and night shifts. But I wonder how many of my friends and family in medicine imagined they’d encounter a situation like this, where going to work every day means playing Russian Roulette with their health, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before they lose the game, and that losing could be deadly.
So for all of the people out there who have chosen to spend their working days caring for other people, I want to say thank you. Because we need you.
I know now that Jan Richardson’s poem had nothing to do with the coronavirus. It’s called “Blessing at the Burning Bush.” Still, it feels right for the times. Like Moses, we’re here in the desert being asked to do something that we’ve never done before. Something that most of us don’t yet know how to do on our own. Something maybe we’re not so great at. But we don’t really have a choice in the matter, so we say yes. And we hope that in the end, something good will come out of it. That maybe all of these changes will eventually make us a little freer, a little less enslaved to the things that dominated our lives in our pre-COVID-19 existence.
When I went looking for Jan Richardson’s website to ask for permission to use her poem today, I came across her blog, paintedprayerbook.com, where she originally posted the poem, along with these words:
Delightful is probably not the first word that comes to Moses’ mind on the day that he hears God calling to him from a bush that blazes but is not consumed. Maybe terrifying, Moses thinks. Maybe overwhelming. Moses hides his face, but he does not leave. He does not turn away from the one who speaks to him and knows his name.
Nearly every story in the scriptures seems, in one way or another, to ask us: Will we open our eyes, our ears? What will we do with what we see, with what we hear? How will we bear the terrible delight of the blessing that blazes before us, that burns within us?
Whatever our faith tradition, I think there’s a message here for all of us. I wonder if there’s a burning bush calling to me, to each of us. Maybe it’s as simple as sending a text or a video message to someone on the front lines to say thank you. Maybe it’s reaching out to someone who is trapped in their house with young children. Or someone who lives alone, who is wondering if anyone remembers them right now.
For those who have medical professionals living in their midst, who know it’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN, maybe it’s prioritizing sleep and restful living, and encouraging our loved ones to do the same if they can. Or maybe it’s finding a way to take better care of yourself, so that you can care for the people in your own home.
Last night my sister-in-law sent a group text to the family to say that the test came back negative. We all sent celebration emojis and virtual cheers. I checked in with Joyce, who seemed to be in good spirits.
Later, I called my mom to see how she, my dad, and my grandmother were doing. I said how grateful I was that Joyce was okay. And then, without thinking, my mom and I both said, “so far.”
She said she wished I was there with them too, that I weren’t so far away. I wish that, too. But then we talked about all of the ways we’ve become more connected these past few days with friends and family all over the country. We reminded each other of people we love who might be glad to hear from us right now. Maybe when this is all over, we can look back on this time as the time when we finally got our priorities straight, and became more integrated with the people we love.
If you've enjoyed this episode, you can leave a review, share it with the friend, and subscribe to the show. The poem I read at the beginning of the episode was “Blessing at the Burning Bush,” by Jan Richardson. I’ve included it in today’s show notes, as well as the author’s website, janrichardson.com. The Shelter in Place music was composed by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions, and the Shelter in Place artwork was created by Sarah Edgell.
Until tomorrow, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.