Finding a Purpose
First, anger. This is ridiculous. Cancellations and closings.
Then resignation, depression, indecision, boredom. Whatever it looks like for you.
Then finding a purpose. This was the sequence for me. How about you?
Wednesday a group of florists around Philadelphia took the flowers they were not going to use and decorated Rittenhouse Square. What a boon this lemonade from lemons was to my neighborhood!
Parents have purpose. The most inspiring articles to me this week are by parents who we usually see in different, professional roles: Massimo Faggioli and Heidi Schlumpf. Each deals with keeping up for their children.
Massimo’s – in this intimate moment, I’ll use first names, though we haven’t been introduced – daughter, getting ready for first communion, misses Mass and suggests family Bible reading. Massimo calls on the Pope to reconceptualize who the Church really is, and “to trust the sensus fidei of the people and find ways that are both creative, but also very traditional (the liturgy of the hours, lectio divina, family celebrations of the Word) to sustain us as we cross this desert.”
Focused on home-based religious education, Heidi is even more practical. Here’s a wonderful dialogue with her children about God’s responsibility for plagues:
“Could coronavirus be a punishment from God?” I asked.
No way, they said. In fact, my son argued that even a virus was God’s creation. Let me tell you, conversation with kids is rarely boring!
This brought back memories for so many years of dotting my Seder plate for each plague. Because Passover is celebrated in the home it may feel less interrupted than Easter will this year.
One more NCR writer who does share his family experience more frequently is Mike Jordan Lasky. This time he writes that “little moments of neighborliness are popping up everywhere,” including a Shamrock hunt in his neighborhood. People put posters in their windows for kids and families to count – one finding 247 in an hour walk in Maryland!
These stories are especially encouraging to me because they are about parents and children keeping the faith. We need to know that in this dark time.
Small faith communities are another encouraging thread in the midst of this crisis. Peter Feuerherd writes about the Latino experience of Encuentro, which fostered many base communities in parishes serving immigrants and others. “The need for human connection with faith life will remain, and peering through a computer screen cannot fill that need,” he writes after a conversation with Hosffman Ospino, a Boston College professor.
But maybe it can. Jamie Manson never fails us. She describes a Zoom meeting that united far-flung members of New York’s Dignity chapter, another small faith community. Jamie and others figured out the technology to have a complete liturgical experience online. I am in awe.
There are many other more theological reflections on what the corona virus crisis might mean for a liturgical church that defines itself communally. NCR has a daily briefing that you can subscribe to. These touched me more right now, and made me realize that working out how to get a group up on Zoom gave me a purpose this week.