It is Sunday morning. I am not on holiday or sabbatical study leave. I am not sick. I have not been fired. I am not trapped in a snowstorm. And yet, I am not getting ready to perform my usual Sunday morning functions in Church.
Thirty-nine years ago, this coming Tuesday, I was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. In all the thirty-nine years since my ordination, I have never missed a Sunday except for holiday or during my one sabbatical leave or during one catastrophic snowstorm. COVID-19 has done what nothing else in my life has managed to do and kept me from presiding at the table with the people among whom I serve.
So, sitting here this morning, knowing that the church building in which I would usually worship today is empty, feels utterly surreal. All those people who would normally make their way to church to connect with one another and to renew their awareness of their connection with God opening their hearts to beauty and truth, are instead sitting at home observing the essential and very important practise of social distancing.
Church exists in part to help overcome social isolation. We seek to facilitate contact, contact with the divine and contact with all parts of God’s creation. We are the training ground for intimacy and vulnerability. And yet here we are being mandated to keep our distance as we must, to avoid people we love, stay as far as possible away from strangers, build plexiglass barriers to avoid contact.
It is an awkward uneasy space to hold. It is inconceivable that life may go on like this for weeks, even months. What is going to happen to intimacy? How will we navigate the terrain of personal connection and human touching in the future?
Life is going to be radically different when Coronavirus finally subsides. Even the experts have no real idea what lies ahead for institutions and human relations.
As I sit with all this discomfort and unknowing, I realize that, in truth, the situation we face today is only a somewhat more dramatic form of the reality in which we always live. The difference is that most of the time I am able to comfort myself with the fragile illusion that I am in control and that I really know what is going on.
In Mark’s Gospel, the Gospel writer tells the story of a man in Bethsaida who was blind. His friends brought him to Jesus and begged Jesus “to touch him.” Instinctively, they seem to have understood that touch is healing.
Jesus took the man who was blind and led him to an isolated place. Then Jesus “put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on the man.”
I am not sure how it feels to have someone put “saliva” on your eyes. But I imagine it would be an unsettling experience. The man who was blind must have felt, at least confused, if not repulsed and humiliated by the sound of spitting followed by the feeling of a stranger’s hands moistening his eyes. What could this awkward action possibly mean? How do you understand having spit rubbed on your face?
If, nothing else, this is a gesture of intimacy and vulnerability. It signifies everything we seek to avoid in life. And yet, curiously, it is this very gesture that begins the process of healing.
Jesus asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees walking.” (Mark 8:24)
Many of us, having been blind, might well have settled for “trees walking.” But Jesus wants more for this man and the man is willing to submit even further to this strange process. So,
Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. (Mark 8:25)
It is difficult in the midst of chaos to see “everything clearly”. It is difficult, when life is so obviously out of control, to see anything “clearly”. It feels as if the best we might hope for is the partial vision that sees people who “look like trees walking.”
Most of the time I see with the “trees walking” kind of blurry vision. But, when I submit to the “touch” of love and bear the pain of not knowing the way forward, I always come to see more clearly.
In this time of isolation and forced distance, I need to find ways to embody the “touch” and vulnerability that heal and bring clarity to the circumstances we face. Only the clarity that comes from “touch” will enable us to move forward with hope and confidence into the uncertain future we face.
4 comments
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March 22, 2020 at 5:52 pm
bobmacdonald
I am thinking of the whole institution of the churches and the mosques and the synagogues and the weddings and funerals and all those things that draw us together. What is it that we missed in our traditions? We have the drama, the music, the beauty, but I wonder if we raised each other well. I wonder if we saw that we must have more to say to governments about the preferential option for the poor that characterizes the religious message.
My grandchildren are growing up with a gentleness learned outside the churches. Though I do not lose my faith, if indeed I can call anything ‘mine’, I don’t want the children to lose the beauty that arose within the traditions especially since such beauty stood against religious power that was abused. (I regret to say that I have been in churches where the beauty is lost.)
This viral problem that we have today is calling us to change. The Lord has arrived and we are like the 5 virgins. How did we become so unprepared?
I think the religious gatherings of the past have been a stimulus to national governance. They helped shape the governments we have today with their varying degrees of health, education, and welfare. Now they are collateral damage within nations that were prepared or not. This phase is the judgment of the nations. And the one who wins is not the one who has the most infections!
As church power ceded its policies to the nation state and the corporation, so they in turn must cede to an international order. A tongue in cheek headline in the Saturday Globe, I think a week or two ago, read: WHO will save us. But more than one institution is required, and someone must pester them to remember care, management, and the judicious use of power. Imagine how this virus will tear through refugee camps. In retrospect, this will be a judgment on much more than nations.
Kevin Arndt in his pastoral letter has noted “that the human family is truly one”. This is a good start. All our work is dependent on many people who are not part of our tradition or belief system. This one human family has to become equivalent to the body of Christ – none can be left out. There is work left to do.
I have been afraid to try and write anything about theology since I finished my translation of Tanach. I have finally done a little meditation on the virus and theology here. I admit I was not thinking of missed gatherings, but of lessons we must all learn together.
March 22, 2020 at 6:52 pm
Christopher Page
Bob thank you for this thoughtful impassioned and quite touching reflection. I’m afraid I could not make the link to your meditation on the virus and theology work
March 22, 2020 at 8:11 pm
bobmacdonald
Both links got mangled – not sure why.
https://meafar.blogspot.com/2020/03/theology-and-covid-19.html
https://www.stjohnthedivine.bc.ca/news/pastoral-letter-from-acting-priest-in-charge-kevin-arndt
technologically challenged today 😐
March 23, 2020 at 7:46 am
Kaytlyn Creutzberg, BSc, NSch, MA
Thank you! I know you’ve taken retirement, but I always appreciate your blogs. Now, can you weave some of this back into the work of Cynthia Bourgeault and Teilhard de Chardin that you have covered?! (with a wink)