On Quarantines, Gathering, and What Makes the Church

While we are rightly sequestered for the sake of others, we ought to remain deeply ambivalent about empty churches.

There is a gap between what quarantine means for liturgical Christians entering Holy Week and those who (in the main) celebrate Easter alone.

Our sacred services are about re-enacting all the events that save the world — the hard and the ugly, the glorious and the joyful — in company as the church.

Our participation in the mysteries—the strange, subversive donkey parade of palms and “hosannas,” the washing of feet, the last supper, the arrest, the trials, the beating, the way of the cross, Golgotha, the seven last words, the shameful, murderous death, the burial, the descent to the dead, the harrowing of hell, the unknowing of Holy Saturday, the grand reversal of resurrection—is communal, is proximate.

So excuse our deep ambivalence — a tension we are not willing to surrender, a feeling we cannot ignore or suppress — about not gathering for these re-enactments where “we…enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, [by which God has] given us life and immortality.”

There is a time for everything — for not embracing — and a time, it now seems, not to gather for the sake of the vulnerable and elderly.

This is the human thing to do, following the mind of the human who is God, but we will not say silly things like the church does not need to gather to be the church.

The presence of Christ by and in the Eucharist makes the church. The body of Christ gathered around his body and blood on the table is the most important human task, is more significant for the life of the world than any other human activity. This is our trust and our practice.

The near-absence from the world of gathered Eucharists is an occasion for grief and ought to elicit discontent.

Yet this too will pass. Such hardships always do. Not meeting is the right thing but we will not rewrite what it means to be the church nor act as though it does not matter.

The drastic separations of Holy Week 2020 will not easily be forgotten. We will in the future no longer take our ability to gather as the church for granted. If 2021 finds us quarantined again from a new wave of this darkness, we will again do what we must.

When eventually we can gather at will we will rejoice and we will remember deep in our bones that communion makes the church.

We will embrace with renewed gladness the mystery that is lifted high from all the tables of all the churches of the world: “Behold what you are, become what you receive” (Augustine).