It could’ve been a line from Bob Dylan, which makes sense, as the living human perhaps most attuned to the mysteries, other dimensions, inexplicable profundities: “Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
From the Gospel according to Matthew? So I hear. Or heard on Sunday, five days after a political earthquake akin to post-Watergate, so you could read into it what you will.
Profundity’s where you find it, in other words, and the basilica in Southampton’s a good place to look. It’s true what they say, or throw up their hands and acknowledge, or complain about, that it’s as if the Catholic Church has cornered the market on the theater of religious ceremony, dramatic rite and ritual, soaring heavenward architecture that leaves you mildly dumbstruck and open to the surfacing of emotions you may not have known were there.
The Rev. Donald Baier, a weekend assistant in the pulpit, with his measured, resonant speaking style, incantatory bordering on mesmerizing, addressed in his homily the parable of the 10 virgins (the word choice cannot be helped at this great remove), half of them wise, half of them foolish, as in careless vis-a-vis oil for their lamps as they await the coming of the “long delayed” bridegroom. They are thus instructed by the more with-it to fend for themselves, understandably but perhaps harshly, as they are subsequently turned away from the wedding feast by their Lord: “Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.”
What comes to you unbidden in the pews, particularly if you aren’t there very often, can be heavy. In terms of lacking preparation, David Hastings in Emma Cline’s new novel, “Switzy,” lays the groundwork for his own clinically administered death to beat dementia to the punch, as it were, and while it’s successful logistically, emotionally the plan is . . . incomplete.
“Life, the littleness of it,” he thinks near the end. What stays is not the road not taken, the mistakes, not the hours of his time on earth he sold for work, but snippets, comforting his wife, drying the tears of his daughter, her clinging to him as they swam in the ocean.
Father Baier invoked the parlor game of musical chairs in his comment on being prepared for a moment of celestial import. “Where will you be,” he closed, the words ringing through the hushed sanctuary, “when the music stops?”