Dialogues of the Fearful

May 5

Hello, again sweeties.

It’s been a long, hard week of mercury retrograde, pluto retrograde, and finishing up with the full moon lunar eclipse in Scorpio. I’m also in tech week for an opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites with Bronx Opera Company, and to tell you the truth, the timing feels really friggen weird.
Synchronicities really hit hard sometimes.

The show is based on a true story of the Martyrs of Carmel and follows the protagonist Blanche de la Force, a young woman from a noble family in France, during the revolution. She is fearful of how the revolution is affecting the nobility so she decides to join a convent, hoping that it will serve as a refuge, and be spared from the fighting in the country. She soon discovers she can’t hide from fear, hers or anyone else

In the opera one of the nuns says, “Everyone’s afraid- They infect one another with their panic.” And that is exactly what we are seeing in our society right now. Fear is the illness, stoked by the divisiveness of our politics and media. Earlier this month Ralph Yarl, a teenage boy was shot after knocking on a door. Kaylin Gillis was shot because she turned around in the wrong driveway. Sadly, everyday there are more and more examples of citizens turning on each other out of fear.
And then this week a man named Jordan Neely was murdered on the subway here in New York City. He was hungry and distressed and yelling on the subway. For those of you not in NYC, this is a normal thing. Lots of trains have houseless people on them, mostly minding their own business, but sometimes they are asking for help, money or food. Sometimes they are just yelling and clearly having some sort of mental episode. Your options are to change cars, give money, or mind your own business. In this instance, a white marine took it into his own hands to silence him, perhaps because he was afraid for his life, although every eye witness has said Neely was not violent or aggressive. The Marine killed him in under 4 minutes with a full train of onlookers and a few people cheering him on.

On Wednesday, while I was working at my restaurant, I saw on my phone an alert that there was an active shooter situation in Atlanta where my girlfriend Deb is this week. I reached out to her and didn’t hear anything from her, a normal thing to happen during the work day, but my mind began to race nonetheless. I was telling myself logically nothing was most likely wrong, CNN hadn’t come out with a statement about “One of our Own” or anything so she was probably okay. After finally hearing from her, I felt such a huge relief coupled with one of the most intense waves of grief I’ve ever felt. At the same time I was reassured that she was okay, someone else wasn’t hearing from their loved one. Someone else was getting the other news. My heart broke into a million pieces and I cried as I continued to work. Some of the customers asked me if I was okay and I told them what happened, and we took moments to grieve together but ultimately I just had to continue working while society cracked around me.

In the third act of the opera, the nuns have been banned from performing their religious services and Mother Marie proposes that they take the vow of martyrdom. She sees it as their only way to fight in this war, all they have is their lives to give. The character I am singing, The Prioress, urged against the lure of martyrdom and fighting. “There are many kinds of courage,” she says. “I expect from heaven's bounty nothing but those modest little virtues which I find the rich and the mighty of this Earth look down upon and hold in scorn. Goodwill to all mankind, endless patience, unselfish humility.” It’s courageous to be a good person. It’s courageous to stand up for people who are being unjustly punished. Her words remind me that even though fear runs deep, love runs deeper. When fear is looked at and truly seen with love, patience, and acceptance, it eases. But, when it is fought with more fear and panic, it implodes.

Jordan Neely maybe was scaring people on the train when he was yelling, but should you not also be scared of his circumstance? We are all MUCH closer to homelessness and hunger than we are to billionaire status and power. What gives this Marine the right to end someone’s life and walk away with it?

I line up every night to get my head cut off by the guillotine as onlookers watch a group of helpless women become symbols of action and fear gone too far. Thankfully, for now, it’s only on stage, but how long until Americans set each other to the scaffold on a regular basis in the name of justice?

<3 Reb