Faith leaders’ year of pandemic: grief, solace and resilience

In a pandemic-wracked year, religious leaders and spiritual counselors across the U.S. ministered to the ill, fed the hungry, consoled the bereaved. Some did so while recovering from COVID-19 themselves or mourning the loss of their own family members and friends.

At times, they despaired. So many people got sick, so many died, and these faith leaders couldn’t hug the ailing and the grieving, or hold their hands. For safety’s sake, their congregations were kept away from in-person services for months, but the need to minister to them only intensified.

Amid the grief and anxiety, these faith leaders found reasons for hope as they re-imagined their mission. Here are some of their reflections on a trying year.

Losses

In the early weeks of the pandemic, the Rev. Joseph Dutan lost his father to the coronavirus. Days earlier Dutan’s mentor and friend, 49-year-old Jorge Ortiz-Garay, had become the first Roman Catholic priest in the U.S. to die from COVID-19.

Dutan felt grief, fear, even doubt. He mourned his father while consoling the community of St. Brigid, a Catholic church in an area that had among the highest infection rates in New York City. His grief, he said, made him better able to help others enduring similar pain.

“When they come in for a funeral Mass of a loved one ... I feel I can relate to them, I can cry with them,” Dutan said. “I comfort them and tell them: ‘Things are going to be all right. We’re not alone; we’re in this together.’”

In the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas said the pandemic’s toll was particularly severe among the many older adults in his Valley Beth Shalom congregation. He estimated that 25 to 50 of its roughly 5,000 members lost their lives to COVID-19 — and even more died, predominantly older congregants, “because COVID created a life situation that was untenable.”

Many were isolated at assisted-care facilities, he said. “There was suicide, drug addiction, exhaustion — all the things you can think of when mental health deteriorates.”

Among the hardest-hit churches has been Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. Its leaders say more than 60 members of the congregation of about 800 have died of COVID-19. Almost all were part of the community of some 400 who attended services in Spanish.

Adjustments

Like thousands of houses of worship nationwide, Valley Beth Shalom shifted swiftly to online services.

Farkas and his team also launched a “war on isolation,” including a new telephone buddy system to connect isolated people starved of human contact. Volunteers selected congregation members whom they called at least once a week, and friendships sprang up between 20-somethings and octogenarians.

With no in-person worship, Farkas encouraged community events respecting health guidelines. For the Purim holiday, 160 families took part in a drivethrough carnival in the parking lot.

“We’ve learned a bunch,” Farkas said, “but if I had to pick one thing, it’s that we didn’t give up.””

Silver linings

Christopher Johnson, an assistant pastor of Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, said his Houston congregation was already suffering from lost social interaction, vanished jobs and food insecurity when it was dealt a new blow in May by the death of his boyhood friend George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Johnson remembered Floyd as a respected community member who helped host a party at the church with free AIDS testing when Houston hosted the Super Bowl in 2017.

Johnson said Floyd’s death, which sparked nationwide protests and awakening on racial injustice, had a special impact in part because it occurred amid a pandemic wreaking a disproportionate toll on African Americans.

“People had to take a pause, and it is in that pause that we realized that the world had changed,” Johnson said.