When on-line church services first began hitting the "airwaves" in early March, watching the Pastor preach on Sunday morning to an empty sanctuary while I absorbed the wisdom of the message in my pajamas was nothing less than really weird.
That's not to say that I was one to spring out of bed on Sunday morning, burst out the door, jump in the car, and bound into church. Mornings just weren't my thing and weekends made them even less my thing. But, more often than not, I managed to roll out of bed on Sunday morning and make it to church kind of on time and rarely for the early 9 a.m. service. I always sat in the back, preferably partially hidden by a post, so that if I succumbed to my body's desire to continue sleeping the morning away, the Pastor was less likely to notice. And my propensity for napping in the morning had little to do with Pastor's message. Mornings just weren't my thing.
As we headed into on-line delivery of sermons, messages, inspiration, communion, worship, and a myriad other aspects of church life that for my entire adult life had taken place in person, I found a few reasons (mostly superficial ones) to enjoy the transition. I really enjoyed the part about sipping hot coffee in my pajamas while taking in the sermon and worship, but the rest took some adjustment. Sometimes during on-line services (shame on introverted me), I enjoyed not having to greet the person next to me. But more often than not, I missed the interaction and the connection that could only come with physically being present in the sanctuary and coffee hour after church. I missed in-person lessons, Sunday school, and the irreplaceable feel of live music and singing that seemed to make it oh so much easier for the holy spirit to fill my often wandering and distracted heart.
By Easter Sunday, on-line church was part of our weekly routine, although it didn't always get delivered on Sunday morning. Pre-recorded video was more likely to finally make it onto our daily schedule in the evening, and sometimes even waited until Monday to be viewed (shame on undisciplined us). We weren't avoiding Christian living. But, I imagine we were not the only ones struggling to keep up a structured daily routine during stay-at-home days that increasingly blurred into one another.
Easter deserved to emerge from the blur, so we awoke on Easter Sunday, dressed in some semblance of Sunday best, and took a seat before the computer. It was not so unusual anymore to walk into cyberspace to see Pastor. And to his credit, Pastor had become funnier over the past weeks, learning to preach to an empty sanctuary and bring humor into the whole process and procedure.
Today, Pastor spoke of the hope that Easter brought to the world in the miracle of the resurrection. He spoke to how unusual it was that on this day, we would not be with our families, celebrating Easter together. He reassured us that isolation would not go on forever, and soon, we would be back to what was normal and usual, celebrating holiday with our families. And, the loneliness of this Easter would become just a sad memory in the landscape of our lives.
As he spoke, a wave of melancholy rolled into my heart, filling every corner and giving me a lot of pause. Because -- this Easter was not so unusual for my husband and I. On Easter and most other holidays, we would eat dinner in our house alone -- my husband's family would as usual be busy with other things and my only surviving relative, my sister, was thousands of miles away. Families would come together and celebrate, deferring friends to other more ordinary days. As best as we could, we had adapted to the loneliness and the sadness that came with Easter and the other annual holidays that arrived while we were in the Pacific Northwest.
Of the many changes in lifestyle and daily activities that came along with the COVID-19 pandemic, loneliness on Easter was not a change at all.
It was simply routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment