Process

A Palm Sunday without palms - unless you count our palms as we pray with hands open before our zoom screens. This was our third week making do without our sanctuary at Holy Apostles. The morning prayer format adopted the first two weeks (our rector decided that it didn't make sense to stream a full service, consecrating a sacrament the congregation could not take) was supplemented with the readings for Palm Sunday, including the long narrative of the Passion according to Saint Matthew, vocalized by our three clergy members from their homes. Like many congregations, we usually process at the start of Palm Sunday, the gateway to Holy Week and a service I've often described to students as the most wrenching of the liturgical year. More muted today, sitting at our consoles, to say the least. The homilist, who last week suggested we were like the "house churches" of early Christian history, today told of us the earliest evidence of Christian pilgrimage and of Holy Week liturgy and meditated on the possibility we were being called this year to an "inner pilgrimage," a "pilgrimage of the heart."

This seems a moment to observe that, as all our social interactions move to zoom, formal and informal, there are some new possibilities emerging. There is an equality to the "gallery view" of an assembled group (though when there are more than twenty-five screens you need to scroll to see them all) and, however awkward and voyeuristic it can be, it offers something we almost never get in real life: a view of many people looking at us with care. It's partly an illusion - most people are looking at the person who's speaking at any given time, and it may be that each person sees a different constellation of others - but I dare say more true than false. We are, if ambiently, aware of each other, of being together with each other, in a distinctive way. I like it, though I also like the moments when we can seem to interact with each other, across the lines of the grid, as when people wave hello and goodbye. I think we could capture some of the overflow of care of the exchange of peace if people sent namaste bows to their left and right and center, all of us knowing that the intention was to engage each and all of us.

The sweetest form of communion I've experienced so far, though, and one we didn't engage in today, builds on that sense of mutual presence in a different way. (We did it last week, and my class visitor to "Religion and Ecology" did it Thursday.) When the leader invites us to close our eyes, in silent prayer or meditation - an act of vulnerability and trust under any circumstances - something wonderful happens. Everyone's still there for each other but we realize we don't need to see each other to know it. We can picture the familiar grid, but each person in it is trusting the others, turning inward but in community. Such an experience of trust and being held in care...

The image of the arrival of Christ in Jerusalem, by Pietro Lorenzeti 
(1320, a quarter century before bubonic plague hit Europe), was posted on
FaceBook by a colleague in lieu of processing at her church...