To quote Pema Chodron: The Wisdom of No Escape (Day 11 of 10 Days of Gratitude)

I can't speak for him or know what's good for him, but I'm grateful I'm here and not there.  Not up there (I assume somewhere in mid-northern Ontario) in an undisclosed survivalist refuge, but down here in the city instead.  In the midst of the pandemic and its consequences.

A few years ago he and I used to meet occasionally for coffee and he told me once that inside the walls of his house he had hidden large caches of preserved, vacuum-sealed food -- six months' worth.  And that when the social apocalypse would come as it surely would in one way or another, he would just break open the walls of his home, load into his truck what he had hidden there, grab his rifle, and head out of Dodge to wait out the End in safety far from the front lines.

I wonder if he's up there now.  

Or if he saw that COVID-19 is not yet the apocalypse he is prepared for, and is still down here among the rest of us.

I swear if he'd somehow woven the name and fear of God into his over-coffee message of The End being near and me needing to be saved from it, he'd have been right up there with today's televangelists and the revival preachers of my youth, offering me fire insurance and a fire-proof escape plan.  Little wonder that as I listened to him I felt an unsettling twinge of anxiety, dread and regret at not being appropriately prepared for what might come.  At not having done what I should be doing to be one of the saved.

Apocalyptic anxiety still rattles in my brain.  I still stumble a bit over the ruins of the fences that an emphasis on personal and individual salvation set around my heart.  And as much as I've learned and come to love a different image of God and of faith than that, old lines drawn in a young heart and mind are hard to erase.

I'm glad I'm here, though. 

I can't speak for my friend -- or for anyone else for that matter, but I cannot imagine for myself a better, more challenging, more formative, more holy place to be than where I am.  

What's good for me is not driving away to a secret place armed to defend myself against others, but letting myself be driven by life to greater dependence on others right where I am.

Down here.