April 28: Cleaning a Church, Ignorance and Faith, Poem from "Kyrie"

One of my side jobs is cleaning a Catholic church--my home parish.  Since the shelter-in-place order began in Michigan, the church doors have been locked tight.  No prayer gatherings.  Or Masses.  Stations of the Cross.  Confessions.  The building has remained empty and silent.

Twice a week, however, my wife and I continue to dust and vacuum and mop.  I clean the bathrooms and empty garbages.  Bleach the toilets and sinks.  An empty church, in a lots of ways, feels unnatural.  It's a place that's meant to hold people.  Of course, if this pandemic has taught me anything about faith and religion, it is this:  the church really isn't about altars and pews, gleaming marble and vaulted ceilings.  Nope.  The church really is about the people sitting in those pews.  They are the bodies of Christ.

My parish priest told me that the bishop will soon be releasing orders stating that the churches in the diocese can be unlocked for prayer time, following all the CDC guidelines for distancing and sanitizing.  So, when I entered the sanctuary this evening to dust and mop, the pews were taped and partitioned.  It was a strange sight to behold, like a weird maze to follow in order to reach the apse of the sanctuary. 

There will be masks in Church on in the coming weeks.  One person per pew.  No hugs or handshakes.  No communion.  The building will simply be open as a place of meditation and prayer.

I worry as things start to reopen, however gradually.  Worry and fear, I know, are the opposite of faith.  Yet, having watched the news over the last four or five weeks, I know that people often use religion as an excuse to ignore scientific common sense.

So, as much as I would love to see the world return to a pre-Covid condition, that is not ever going to happen.  That "normal" will never return.  So we must adjust.  Pray six-feet apart.  Wear face masks.  Avoid human contact.  That is how we will survive and overcome.

Science is not the enemy of faith.  Ignorance is.

Saint Marty prays for people to be smart in the coming days.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth.
You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop.
What wouldn't burn you boiled like applesauce
out beside the shed in the copper pot.
Apple, lightwood, linen, feather-bed--
it was the smell of that time, that neighborhood.
All night the pyre smouldered in the yard.
Your job:  to obliterate what had been soiled.

But the bitten heart no longer cares for risk.
The orthodox still passed from lip to lip
the blessed relic and the ritual cup.
To see in the pile the delicate pillowslip
she'd worked by hand, roses and bluets--as if
hope could be fed by giving up--