How are we doing as worshipping communities emerging from a global pandemic? The answer is probably, ‘it depends’ – where are we in the world and who are we talking about? I can only ask the question from a particular corner of the world, and from the limited perspective of a few Roman Catholic and a few Anglican/Episcopal parishes.
For me the first reflection is theological – what have we learned about liturgical rites and sacramental liturgies? Many of us (on these pages of PrayTellBlog and elsewhere) have noted that we were ill-equipped to immediately cope with the restrictions which COVID brought us, particularly with regard to sacramental rites. Those who have exercised ministry with the sick and dying did, against all odds, find ways to “pray over” not just “pray for” those in need of the church’s gifts of ministration to the bodies most in need, exercising extraordinary measures to be frontline sacramental ministers. The broader community was confronted with baptisms and confirmations and weddings, mostly delayed (or held outdoors or adjusted in interesting ways – including some unfortunate attempts at virtual baptisms), as well as drive-by confessions.
The central conversation for many with regard to the pandemic and sacramental life was often about the eucharist, or specifically, the reception of communion. My experience was not only frustration at the necessary restrictions, but the realization of the poor job of catechesis many of us had done at the parish level. There was a mighty confusion within the body of Christ celebrating the eucharist together and the reception of communion. As the daily or weekly celebration of the eucharist continued first with presiders at their dining room table with smart phones, then to a handful of people in the church building with a bit more sophisticated livestreaming, we still had oddities, such as “no one receives communion until everyone receives communion” and other approaches that made no sense except in the misconception of “getting communion” as an object of quantity. There were creative alternatives for communion (drive-up, dropped off on front porches, socially distanced outdoor celebrations), and my favourite, outside roofless churches built of ice walls where one might presume the cold kept away the spread of disease. But there were also both official and unofficial prayers for spiritual communion which became helpful not only in the prayer life of people watching online but also as those prayers began to break a logjam for many worshipping communities who assumed eucharist and reception of communion were inseparable. To “attend” or “watch” a eucharistic celebration and consciously not receive communion opened the way to celebrating the eucharist without immediate tangible consumption and allowed catechesis to enter which helped some communities understand that the eucharistic celebration was not only for their reception of communion but for the good of the whole world. My sense is we have not yet reaped the results of the addition of spiritual communion prayers in many communities.
What have we learned as we have returned to ‘in-person’ liturgy? First, the phrase “in-person” is not unimportant. The physicality of one’s whole being in a space with other bodies has renewed conversations about ritual engagement, procession, and the materiality of ritual and liturgical practices. My experience in the neighbourhood is first about the social dimension. People who have returned are almost gleeful. The importance of coffee hour (and the virtual revolt in those communities where that was not happening) has confirmed for me the costs of isolation and loneliness. It has taken a while for people to learn how to talk with each other again, rather than all of us talking at once. The joy of singing together, making sandwiches for the hungry together, all the little things we took for granted, have spilled back into the liturgy. We have missed being community, being the body of Christ together in one place at one time – and that has, in prompting, elicited reflections on the “we” of Christianity. There are also those who have not returned. For some, the health risks mean they cannot return, for others there is a fear out of proportion to reality, for others still there is a loss of habit in “going to church.” Without the social support, they may not return. And – there are the ‘new people’. In every parish I have helped out in over the past year, there are new people showing up. Something in their lives post-pandemic has led to a need to walk in the door, to see what this is all about or to restore something missing in their lives for a very long time.
Theological questions, social questions, and suspended between the two of them, technological questions. Or perhaps better put, how do we do and how are we doing in hybrid liturgy? As the balance has tipped toward people returning to church (including, in one parish, people returning when the livestreaming stopped as an option), where are we? Is the primary ‘congregation’ the one online, or in the room? My experience is the equipment to maintain the virtual congregation often took centre stage – directly affecting the ‘performance’ of liturgy because it all had to be within the scope of a camera which was often unmoving. This resulted in liturgies that did not “move” – a type of late medieval restoration of the ‘private mass’ – all done at the altar and mostly by one person. In some places, far better equipment has changed that. But in other places, either from exhaustion of the few ‘tech people’ or of a deliberate choice to prioritize those present and proximate, the cameras are taking a back seat (literally) or being turned off. The calls for countless workshops and discussions on how to do these liturgies continue, but at a muted level compared to a year ago. While a number of meetings (and prayer groups) continue online, my experience (again – in one corner of the world and in two ecclesial communities) is the waning of the virtual.
So much of our liturgy is about the eschatological trajectory we are on as well as the eschatological source of our being. How do we take the almost obligatory conversations about “where are these people?” “why haven’t they come back?” and turn it to “where are we going with these new people?” “how do we together invite many more to hear these lifegiving words and to learn to pray?” How have our lived experiences of being immersed in something beyond our control changed our prayer? How has living so close to death and the imminent possibility of death changed our priorities? How have the implications for our daily life and work called us as individuals to reassess what we actually need versus what we want? And how have all of these changed our liturgies?
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