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What is Church in the Midst of a Pandemic?

5/27/2020

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by Cassandra Carmichael
Picture
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
​I, like many others, haven’t set foot inside a church in months. We recently moved to a new city and were in the midst of trying to find our church “home” when the pandemic hit. Since then, I have attended several different virtual worship services and even conducted church at home with my kids. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling, however, that I have been missing something.
 
The weekend of Palm Sunday, my neighbor built an outdoor sanctuary in his backyard. He used an old log and cut it up in sections to make a row of “pews” 10 deep. There were even kneelers in front of each seat, a testament to his Catholic upbringing. The altar he erected at the front of the outdoor cathedral included an abundance of Mayapples for the floor and a makeshift crucifix scene made up of three dead branches hanging from a limb. My neighbor unveiled it on Palm Sunday. He recounted his experience carrying the large branches across his back to put them in place. He got stabbed by the thorn branches he draped across the crucifix scene. His experience, thorns and all, seemed much more connected to the Easter story than a simple reading of the Bible text. 
 
My eight-year-old daughter insisted that we visit the outdoor cathedral every day during Holy Week. We would often bring flowers to place on the altar. She would inevitably say a prayer. A few times she stood at the front of the cathedral and preached to an empty congregation (save for me) about love. 
 
These experiences—my neighbor inadvertently recreating the crucifixion experience and my young daughter donning the preaching robes—were reminders that time spent with God out of doors are profoundly impactful. Would my neighbor have felt the Easter story as deeply this year if he was attending mass indoors? Would my daughter have dared speak out about loving others if she had been inside a sanctuary?
 
The churches and cathedrals that are found or made out of doors have provided us an opportunity to experience God in a whole new way during the pandemic. The stripping away of walls can make us bolder as we seek a connectedness. And without walls, which often separate us from the rest of the world, we can begin to experience God in ways that are sacred and transformational. 
 
Perhaps what has been missing has not been the gatherings for worship inside of four walls, but my own ability to experience the connectedness to God in the everyday and to recognize the sacredness of moments held in God’s larger cathedral—the created world.
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