This week, it’s starting to feel like maybe we’re making real progress back to “normal”. Peter is in day camp, I’m working in the office again, and just now I walked to Non Solo Pane for a pastry, just like in the old days.
Coming back into the office on Tuesday. Nobody had changed the calendar since Lent III.
Going back to doing church in person, though, is going to take some more time. For several reasons, worship is a uniquely risky endeavour – partly because our congregation includes many people with particular vulnerabilities; partly because singing is one of the best ways to spread the virus; and partly because simply being with a large group, inside a building, for more than a few minutes, is inherently risky.
By now, you have received the document outlining the Diocese of Montreal’s policies for reopening churches, and the very helpful summary/diagram; so you will have gathered that the very first time that we might be able to have church in person would be September 6, and that’s only if the numbers in Quebec continue to look good.
And when we do gather, it will look and feel very different than it did before, at least for a period of time. We will not be able to mingle and chat before and after worship (at least, not inside the building – thank goodness for the lawn!). In Phase II (the first stage beyond complete shutdown), we can neither sing nor have Eucharist; in Phase III, we will still be skipping the singing, as well as the communion wine. Only when we are given permission to advance to Phase IV will we really be able to go back to anything resembling “church as we know it”.
In Phases II and III, our numbers will be limited to either 50 people, or as many as can fit in the sanctuary with social distancing (whichever is smaller). We will probably ask you to reserve a spot in advance for services you plan to attend, so as to make sure we don’t exceed capacity! The 8 AM service will not be able to sit in the choir stalls. And there will be regimens of cleaning and sanitizing which will be, frankly, exhausting. Phase II, in particular, is essentially “Zoom church but in person” and one might be forgiven for thinking that just staying with Zoom would be preferable!
And for those who wish to remain as safe as possible, we will continue broadcasting church by Zoom for the foreseeable future – one silver lining of the pandemic is that we were forced to learn how to do it, and now we can apply that learning to making our services accessible in a way they weren’t before March of 2020!
However, we will also be proceeding as quickly as we can through Phase II and toward Phase III and, ultimately, the more-or-less complete reopening of Phase IV, because we must move through the phases in order – we can’t skip from Phase I (where we are now) straight to Phase III (Eucharist). Phase II will be a practice run, essentially, to ensure that we can follow all the necessary procedures before adding the complicating factor of Eucharist back into the equation.
All this makes it sound like reopening church is just a matter of checking boxes and addressing practical concerns, and of course while we want to do those things, it is also so much more. We are all going to have a lot of feelings about this process as it moves forward. We have learned to be community in a new way during the shutdown, and we may find that our emotions about returning to church in person are more complicated than we expect. Families with children have a particularly difficult set of decisions to make, as kids who are mobile but still small cannot be expected to observe social distancing consistently. We are going to continue to miss each other, and miss church as it used to be, for quite a while after we are back together in the building to at least some extent.
And there are many things we can learn from the strange experience that we have been through, and that will make many things about our lives different going forward. We have learned about the strength of the bonds that connect us, about the power of prayer, and about what is really important. There are many conversations that will continue through and beyond this reopening process, and as always, I welcome your comments, calls, and emails!
In hope,
Grace+
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