HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
FOR CHRISTIANS, JEWS AND MUSLIMS, SOCIAL DISTANCING IS DISRUPTING SACRED RITUALS
A funny thing happened when the Pope said mass in a nearly empty St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome last weekend, on Palm Sunday, to mark the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the final days of his life.
“La pace del signore sia sempre con voi,” Pope Francis said in Italian to the half- dozen socially distanced people before him, meaning “the peace of the lord be always with you.” It is the moment in the mass when, in normal times, Catholics are invited to shake each other’s hand as a sign of peace.
Not any more. The Catholic service is epidemiologically awkward at the best of times, from putting fingers in a communal dish of water then touching your face to make the sign of the cross, before lining up together to take bread from someone else’s bare hands, sometimes even directly onto one’s tongue. During a pandemic it is downright dangerous.
So all eyes were on Pope Francis to see how he would handle this, whether with an alternative suggestion, like smiling or bowing or the two-fingered hippie peace sign or maybe just a word of caution.
Just then, however, a cleric who had been flipping pages for him discreetly sidled up to the altar and rotated the mic away. The Pope kept speaking, but could not be heard, and the camera cut away.
It had the feeling of a missed opportunity, a chance to demonstrate one little aspect of the future of communal religious observance in the new age of infection control.
No one is going to church these days, or synagogue, or mosque, or gurdwara, or temple of any sort. Everything is closed, and as a result, religion has been upended, and with it a fundamental way of life for thousands of Canadians.
Continuities are being broken. No Catholic, for example, held palm fronds or folded them into crosses on Palm Sunday this year, and therefore Ash Wednesday 2021 will not use ashes from this year’s palms, as usual. A ritual link will be severed.
Jews need a minyan, a quorum of 10 adult males, for certain prayers to be said, but this has been understood in light of another scriptural imperative that sets protection of life as a priority. So as Passover begins this week, many Jews are in the unusual position of agreeing to refrain voluntarily from doing what people were willing to die for in times past, said Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“It’s a strange time,” said Mustafa Farooq, CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, who has been missing Friday prayers for the first time in ages. “There is something inherently taxing to not be with each other, to not see each other.”
Funerals have been especially hard for mourners, he said. More common are the disruptions in the normal five- part daily routine of Islamic practice. Most common are the cancellations of family and congregational dinners.
Food universalizes religion, gives non- believers a taste of the iftar, the seder, or the supper of the lamb. This year, Passover coincides almost exactly with Easter, and Ramadan begins later in April. All traditionally involve communal meals that reach beyond the faithful to nearly everyone in Canada.
A tweet circulated this week, for example, offering phone numbers to call for delivery of vegetarian Sikh food for truckers far from home.
The Jewish kitchen is especially complicated at Passover, with different dishes, and this year the pandemic caused fear about the supply of matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during Passover, much of which is imported from Israel or the U. S. In the end, supplies came through because of efforts by the federal government and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Fogel said.
Many religions have harnessed their thwarted devotional energies into charitable works, such as the Canadian Muslim Response Network, an alliance of charities that have been distributing care packages by partnering with food banks and shelters, even other religious groups like the Salvation Army, according to Reyhana Patel at Islamic Relief Canada.
“It’s hard for everyone. You just have to have your own focus and motivation,” she said.
There have been adaptations, such as sharing holiday meals over video chats, but this option is not available to Jews who observe the ban on devices such as a phone on Shabbat. It can also be frustrating and disappointing, compared to actually being with people.
Fogel said this communal aspect is at the core of despair over religious disruptions of the pandemic. “I know many who are just distraught,” he said. “But by the same token it has forced them to reflect on what the essence of prayer is, and that really, when you strip everything away from it, all of the social dynamics and group activity, fundamentally prayer is about connecting to the divine.” This social isolation is revealing prayer can be “something completely pure and simple,” Fogel said, almost liberating.
Christianity needs a social dimension to invoke the presence of Jesus, with a numerical minimum taken from the words of Jesus himself: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.” This is not understood to preclude solo religious experience, but it does mean solo Easter celebrations will lack a certain someone.
Ramadan migrat e s throughout the calendar, so although it begins in April this year, it is not always in spring. But Passover and Easter are always spring festivals, infused with a sense of rebirth and optimism that this year will be especially poignant, as people quarantine with the sun shining, birds chirping, insects buzzing and green returning. These images are from the oldest parts of shared culture, deep in the mythic past.
The Last Supper was a Passover celebration, and Passover itself was originally about staying inside during a plague, as the Israelites did in Egypt before their liberation, during the last of 10 plagues foretold to Moses.
Jews in particular have hard- won modern wisdom about maintaining observances despite isolation and fear. Fogel recalled a story his father used to tell him, a memory from his childhood experience in a Nazi concentration camp, in which some of the prisoners around him at Passover “were desperately trying to cling to some religious anchor during a time of such chaos and horror.”
One man, however, was scornful of all these energies going to scrounging up the makings of unleavened bread and other traditions. He complained Passover is supposed to celebrate liberation, “the antithesis of what they were experiencing.”
It fell to an older person to rebuke him and express the moral insight that Passover is not just a celebration of liberation from slavery, but a celebration of hope, “and that’s not something we’re ever permitted to abandon, even in the darkest time,” as Fogel put it.
“I think that this whole experience is also providing us an opportunity to capture some of those memories, close our eyes and take a picture that will serve as a reference point from which we’ll derive meaning in years to come,” he said.
Passover 2020, like Easter and Ramadan, will be one for the ages.
prayer is
about connecting to the divine.