Stories from quarantine: Holy Week.

I don’t know about you, but this is one of the strangest Holy Weeks I can remember.

Navigating this pandemic has either been the most fitting or the most terrible way to walk through Lent: isolated, alone. I struggle with Lent, anyhow: the focus on grief and penitence is difficult to sustain for that long. (Real talk: it’s even harder in the years where we have tough winters.)

This year I have been (loosely) following some of Sarah Bessey’s kind, pragmatic Field Notes Lent practices. And I have been extra glad I went to the noon Ash Wednesday service at Old South Church, because – though I didn’t know it then – I wouldn’t get to go to church again for a while.

I have heard a couple of mini-sermons this week, from an acquaintance back in Texas and from my friend Simon, in Oxford. (I don’t have much patience for sermons these days, but I will listen to him preach any day of the week.) Both talks included exhortations to hang onto God, who has not let go of us, and reminders that Jesus, of all people and all deities, understands fear and suffering. I also heard a little looking ahead to Easter Sunday, which to me seems premature. I know it’s coming, but I am not ready yet; we are still sitting in the darkness after that earthquake on a Friday afternoon, not knowing what the hell just happened or what might be coming next.

Tied up with the general isolation grief is my lingering church grief: I lost my church community here in Boston, abruptly and painfully, in the fall of 2018. I have tried to move on, to forgive and let go, but the wound has not fully healed yet. I had heard stories of churches hurting their members and their ministers, treating them badly, but I never thought it would happen to me. Palm Sunday used to be a glorious day at Brookline; the kids would march around the sanctuary waving palm branches while we sang every song we could find that involved the word Hosanna. I could hardly face the thought of it, this year.

I’ve been streaming bits of the Sunday services from two churches that are still mine: Highland, in Abilene, where I spent my college, post-college and newlywed years, and St Aldates, in Oxford, where Simon preaches and where I went every Sunday (sometimes twice) when I was in graduate school. I couldn’t stream anything on Palm Sunday, though: the mere fact of it broke my heart. We are usually together, singing Hosanna, and this year so many of us are alone.

We are sad and aching, fearful and weary, and on the days when I can muster up a little faith, I know this is where God meets us. I also know that faith resists all our attempts to write it into a tidy narrative. I grew up among tidy narratives, alliterative three-point sermons, questions and answers easily matched with Bible verses. My adulthood has brought doubts and change, messiness and grief – they do not fit into those neat boxes. Neither, I have to say, does the joy that comes bursting out when you least expect it, found in the most unlikely of places.

I am often full of fear these days, and I don’t have the answers, either for the current crisis or any others I might face. For now, I am holding onto the words my friend Christie wrote on Instagram earlier this week: “the good news is that ours is not the last word. The Word has spoken—is always speaking—and the message is mercy and love.”

If you are marking Easter or Passover or simply the arrival of each day, I wish you joy, mercy, and love where you can find it, in these days.

Advertisement