Resilience

1: the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens.

2: the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, pressed, bent, etc.

https://www.merriam-webster.com

Sitting in church today, I started thinking about these stupid little communion “snack packs” and how much I want to return to receiving the communion while standing around the altar. The eucharist is at its very core a communal activity. When we partake in the elements, we do so with everyone else across space and time for whom this is an essential act of their faith. It connects us with something so much bigger than ourselves. Sitting in a pew communing ourselves falls quite short of the experience of the pastor (or lay ministers) placing the bread and wine into our hands with the words “the body of Christ” and “the blood of Christ.”

But, why did this hit me so hard today? I’m not sure. We’ve been self-administering communion for quite some time now. It’s never felt quite right, but today it became more poignantly out of place. Perhaps it is because we are starting to see signs of things returning to “normal.” For the first time since March of 2020, we sang, as a congregation, as part of Sunday morning worship. But, we’re still sitting in a sanctuary with half of the pews roped off to maintain social distancing. There is still the question in the air as to whether or not we should be worshipping in person in the light of Omicron. We’ve had hope before that we’re nearing the end of the time of Covid… and always it has slipped away. What makes today different?

Perhaps it’s because I started looking at these little vessels of plastic with their hermetically sealed miniature oyster cracker and couple drops of wine in a slightly different way. I saw them as both a necessity and a symbol. Faced with the option of completely dropping communion from worship or modifying it to mitigate the risk of spreading the pandemic, we chose the latter. We chose to adapt our practices to the reality of the world. It doesn’t mean we have to like the new direction. It simply means we like less the thought of abandoning our traditions completely. We chose to become strong again after something bad happened.

The church is in the midst of crisis right now. The pandemic is stretching congregations to figure out what is important and what is not. The pandemic cannot, however, be blamed for the angst the church finds itself in today. The world is changing. People are questioning the value of religious practice. What exactly is the role of the church in the world… and why should we care if it were to shutter its doors and slip quietly into obscurity? These are the questions the church must address. Far too many in the church would rather bury their heads in the sand and look backward to what the church was and bemoan the fact that so many no longer see things their way. This is what is meant by the “attack on religion.” It’s not really an attack. It’s indifference. No, the pandemic is not the cause of the church’s current crisis, but it will certainly serve as a winnowing rod to test its resilence.

As I look at this little bit of plastic with its paltry contents, I cannot help but have a love/hate relationship with it. It is a reminder that everything must change. Do we dare hope that worship might eventually return to its original shape after it has been stretched by the realities around Covid? Or, will we be looking at something new but returned to health? Either way, this little cup tells me that the church has the resiliency to weather its current woes.

Note that I also contemplated the fact that this is not unique to churches. We are seeing changes to so many of our institutions and are left dazed trying to figure out what will and what will not survive. I simply chose to skip over that in this blog post today.