Most years on Easter Sunday, our churches are filled to capacity with regulars and visitors, elbow to elbow in the pews.
The people who don’t regularly come to services can’t always explain why they’re drawn to come. They just know it’s important.
This year, the novel coronavirus makes everything different. Most churches don’t want you in the pews for your own safety, so we’re not spreading the virus that changed everything outside our homes’ doors over the past month.
But does it really change Easter? Does it really change the need to have God in our daily lives? Does it really change the fact that Jesus died for our sins and rose again three days later, fulfilling both what prophets wrote and what he told his disciples?
Is this year really all that different after all?
We’ve been blessed in this country with our right to attend whatever type of religious service we like, or no service at all if we choose. We sometimes slip into thinking the only place we can find God is inside a building’s walls.
Don’t get me wrong, many of my most meaningful interactions with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit happened inside a church. That’s not where it’s limited, though.
Those original disciples didn’t have a building to visit every Sunday, though. They were, like we are, separated by fear. Many went back to their everyday lives after the crucifixion. They assumed that was the end of the story, not the beginning of it. Luckily for us all, they realized that, as it says in Matthew, “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
The Second Vatican Council of the Catholic church wrote, “The family is, so to speak, the domestic church.” It’s never been more true than now.
Now is the time our children should see us praying, reading scripture and trusting in the Lord. Now is the time to remember when things seem to be spiraling out of our control, everything is in His control. We can’t lose our faith in times of crisis. We must rely on it.
The churches are quiet now. There aren’t hundreds of people kneeling in silent prayer or singing along with a choir. I’ve been helping at my church put our Masses onto Facebook Live. It was pretty eerie for a couple of the liturgies, where just the priest and I were inside our large church.
It would’ve been easy to feel alone in there, if it weren’t for the hundreds of people joining us virtually. It reminded me how much these people still needed to be connected with the Word of the Lord, even if it’s via the internet. The emojis crying touched me when the priest lifted into the air the bread and wine, which Catholics believe become the body and blood of Christ himself through transubstantiation. People were saddened they couldn’t partake of that holy sacrifice directly, only spiritually.
I look forward to the day the church’s congregation can fill those rows again. I eagerly await the chance for all these people to get what they desperately need in these trying times.
Yet I also remind them that the peace of the Lord never really left. We were never alone. We merely need to trust in Jesus, in his church, and we can feel that peace again.
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