FR BRIAN D’ARCY

Fr Brian D’Arcy spent lockdown in his home in Tobar Mhuire, Co Down, from where he said Mass and funerals and wrote for the ‘Sunday World’

PRACTICAL

I haven’t a moment through all of this. I am as busy as I possibly can be and it’s all down to this thing called Zoom. It may have existed before, but I never knew about it.

I’ve been saying Masses on Zoom and talking to people in ICU wards on Zoom and doing things with families who can’t come home for funerals.

One Sunday, I had three different funerals on Zoom, with some people in America, some in Australia. They were able to do their prayers of the faithful and their own prayers. It made the Mass a little more real for them. And became a source of comfort.

We used to talk about a Dr Google, now there’s a Bishop Zoom.

I’ve discovered that when you can’t have the real thing, you make the best of the next best thing. I have been facilitating through Zoom and the power of love can be conveyed through Zoom.

Before all this, I would have been sceptical about using technology this way. I would have said that if I can’t go in to a hospital and talk to a person, or see them in the flesh, then it’s only playing at being a priest through a computer.

I still think that to an extent, but should a person be left with nothing if that’s the case? I say no, I will do what I can, and leave the rest to God.

PERSONAL

Put it this way, I’m very glad I didn’t join the Cistercians and wasn’t locked up. Through all this, I’ve been locked up with five monks in the one house, and all I can say is we’re doing our best.

I’ve done prison chaplaincy for many years and sometimes I would have thought that those guys have it easy compared to some people I know, but now I know that the freedom to move is an unbelievably difficult freedom to lose.

A definition of suffering is to lose control and I would never have thought that before, but here we are; we can’t control the future, we don’t know what it will be, and we are incapable of being in control of nearly anything.

To the modern person, who has been told we can ‘do anything’, that is very difficult.

I don’t like the word cocoon, we’re just quarantined up in the North, but I didn’t like that at all, either. Neither are pleasant words, but I knew, as an over-70, it was for me. The worry that I might contract the virus was the lesser worry, but the idea that I might spread it — I would never forgive myself.