May 22, 2020
My dear St. John’s community,
In this extraordinary time, we come to a shared marker on our calendars, Memorial Day Weekend. In past years Memorial Day was a time for respite, for travel, for outdoors relaxation on the seasonal cusp of summer. This year, it is full of uncertainty and angst as we enter our third month of social distancing and economic shutdown to contain the outbreak of COVID-19. I cannot say if I have by now adjusted to life during a pandemic or not. Like many other parents of young children during this time, my experience of balancing parenting, home schooling, work and marriage has been stressful and demanding. I am often struggling to move gracefully from one hour to the next hour let alone from one month or from one season to the next. But here I am, here we are on Memorial Day Weekend, and our way of life during a pandemic is shifting.
Here in Massachusetts, the toll of COVID-19 is great, and while to this point we in the St. John’s community have not experienced any direct loss of life, many of those we love have suffered greatly as shared in our weekly Prayers of the People during Sunday worship. But it appears here in Boston the worst of the surge is over and our state and city governments are putting in place the steps we need to take to reopen our common life.
We last gathered for worship as a community on March 8, and at the time none of us knew it would be our last public worship service for the foreseeable future. If I had known, I would have made an effort to seal in my heart the experience of looking at your wonderful open and attentive faces and hearing your strong voices uplifted in prayer and song and touching your open and caring hands as we shared the peace and I served you the bread of Holy Communion. I suspect when many of you heard Governor Baker’s directive earlier this week that houses of worship may reopen, you felt a surge of hope and excitement that we can experience worship this way again. But at St. John’s, we will not open for public worship at this time as we continue to follow the directive of our leaders, Bishop Gates and Bishop Harris, prohibiting public worship until July 1, knowing that date is tentative and may be extended.
Our Diocese of Massachusetts has a team of experts helping our bishops fashion how our worship life will be conducted safely during this time of pandemic. The Diocese has released a document jointly with the Diocese of Western Massachusetts detailing the challenging steps ahead when our public health measurements meet key thresholds. You can access this document at the COVID-19 resources page of the Diocese’s website: www.diomass.org.
My dear friends, we are in for a long and difficult journey when we restart our public worship life. As we have learned more about COVID-19, it’s implications for public worship have become clearer. When we next see each other's faces in public worship at St. John’s, we will have masks covering them. When we lift our voices, the masks will muffle our words of prayer and we will not be lifting our voices in song. Our open hands will not clasp one another joyfully during the Peace and they will not give and receive the consecrated bread or the chalice of sacred wine of Communion. It will be a radically different experience from the worship we shared on March 8, and it will be different for a long time to come.
I do not know if or when I will ever adjust to life in a pandemic, but I do know that I am fully adjusted to going on this journey with you as your priest, wherever it leads us. With your wardens and vestry, we are working on how best to carry on as a vibrant, connected faith community in this time. While we lose some things, we also gain other things, and in the midst of these challenges there is reason to be positive and hopeful. We will learn and grow together, and as we keep close to Christ and support one another in love, we will emerge from this time stronger, more compassionate and better than we entered it.
With peace, love and blessings,
Ted+