Part I

Over the course of this ever extending quarantine I ponder the question:

What is church?
Is it the building we meet in, the chairs we sit on, or the coffee that we drink?
Is it the minister’s words, or the choir’s song that draws you in every week?
Or is it more likely the people that are the church.
We are it’s pillars, rafters and beams,
held together by spider threads of connection that run between us and bind the building together around us.
This is community.
This is church.

We have all been experimenting with the concept of digital church, wondering how we are to maintain a community without a physical dimension. How do we compensate for that lack of intimacy? By creating new ones. The children and youth have done this by bringing each other into their homes through Zoom – showing off art projects or beloved toys, backyard hammocks and bedroom posters, internet memes and grumpy cats.

The youth group even did a present exchange where they had 2 weeks to make a present for their peer. It had to be something they made. The idea was that these would eventually be exchanged. In the mean time, the gifts were exchanged via Zoom. For example, Maggie asked for a song and Hannah wrote and sang her a song about the quarantine to a Taylor Swift tune and Sam drew a cat in a “rainbow sweater” for Katie who had asked for a cat.

COVID-19 has forced the world to change, but we must decide for ourselves whether to change along with it.

Part II

Last month was the first March since 2002 that has not had a school shooting. What wonderful news! There should be parades in the street until we stop and remember that it isn’t because of any new gun reform legislation or better access to mental heath counseling.

The deaths had continued through student walk outs, and teachers being armed to the teeth. The deaths only stopped when school stopped, when the world stopped. It took a pandemic to save our kids, but it did more than that.

The ozone layer is closing as fossil fuel emissions go down, the Himalayan mountains are visible again for the first time in decades as air pollution decreases world wide, fish are returning to the Venetian canals and bears are once again seen in Yellowstone.

April is all about Earth Day, a time to reconsider the environmental impact of our laundry detergent, wonder why everything is twice wrapped in plastic, and making new resolutions about farmers markets, vegan diets, and learning to compost.

Resolutions that often get swallowed up by kids’ soccer practice, toddlers who refuse to eat vegetables, busy schedules, and how much simpler it would be to just order a pizza. Change is hard, and global change in a greed based economy is even harder, but let this pandemic show that change is possible. We’ve learned that more people really can work from home; teachers deserve not only praise but funds and resources; mental heath is as important as physical health; minimum wage isn’t enough to live on; vaccines are important; and our choices matter.

Let us use this time of isolation to reflect upon our consumer choices, to realize the value of our buying power, research more sustainable options so that when the quarantine ends and the world again begins to spin upon its axis we will be able to go into the world with new eyes to see the problems, ears to hear the cries of the fallen, and voices to raise up in unison to demand change