Coronavirus has emptied places of worship, but here’s how it also fuels our faith
Faith has endured this Easter season in Sacramento because COVID-19 has done more than made us sick and scared. The virus has humbled us.
Faith begins with humility.
“This pandemic is making us understand that we are not the owners of the universe,” said the Rev. Francisco Hernandez, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “We are not the owners of our lives. Our lives are fragile. We can’t control everything. We are not almighty.”
We have always remembered this together, shoulder-to-shoulder, unified in prayer and worship in religious sanctuaries. This Easter Sunday defies comparisons, as our sanctuaries, for the time being, are at home.
Houses of worship all over the region are empty on the most sacred day of the calendar for Christians.
For much of the Lenten season, most churches have been shuttered and the faithful have spent days in home isolation to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Temples and mosques have closed down, too, as have most places people pray in large numbers.
Sadly, churches in Sacramento have been epicenter of COVID-19 outbreaks. Some church communities have been vilified for defying shelter-at-home orders. For non-believers, the desire of some religious people to continue gathering – despite the risk of transmitting a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people worldwide – has inspired social media shaming and scorn.
Some churches have become punchlines for a secular culture that increasingly takes a dim view of organized religion, sometimes for justifiable reasons.
Yet organized faith is in the DNA of Sacramento. It begins with the very name of our city, which is the Spanish word for “Sacrament.”
In the early 19th century, the Spanish explorer Gabriel Moraga surveyed and named the Sacramento River as the Rio del Santísimo Sacramento. An homage to the sacrament of the Eucharist became the oldest incorporated city in California and the state capital.
What grew in this place was a diverse faith community.
St. Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church, Congregation B’nai Israel, St. John’s Lutheran Church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Westminster Presbyterian and others were established faith centers before the Cathedral for the Blessed Sacrament was completed in 1889.
Ever since, a culture of faith has informed the region through floods, fires, disease, calamity, wars and economic meltdowns that tested Sacramento long before COVID-19.
While scorn heaped on churchgoers for defying shelter at home orders drew the headlines, selfless people of faith have quietly been working to build and maintain a sense of community in this last month we’ve been separated from each other by a pandemic.
Virtual religious services
Hernandez said that before the pandemic, weekday masses at his luminous church near Southside Park – the spiritual home of Latino Catholics in Sacramento – would draw often draw 20 people.
But since the state stay-at-home order shuttered Our Lady of Guadalupe, masses have been lived-streamed on the church’s Facebook page, and interest has soared.
“Now that we are transmitting masses, we are getting 3,000 to 4,000 people on weekdays,” Hernandez said. “On Sunday’s we get 15,000 people.”
People missed church deeply when they no longer could gather there. The Rev. John McGarry, president of Jesuit High School, has had a similar experience.
“The hardest thing for our students is not being able to come to campus and be with each other…They find physical isolation challenging,” McGarry said. “Even though when they are here they sometimes don’t want to be here.”
McGarry said he sometimes walks the empty Jesuit campus, imagining the students being there, walking in their footsteps, and hearing their voices.
“Our Lenten journey and our COVID-19 journey merged and became one journey…We’re in this together as a community even though were apart,” he said.
Keeping communities together despite physical separation has created an ache for what we have lost and a desire to soothe that pain by creating community from a distance.
“The hardest part has been not being able to hug people,” said Rabbi Mona Alfi of Congregation B’nai Israel.
Ancient rituals have had to be re-imagined this year.
The observance of Passover, for example, began at sundown April 8, and concludes the evening of April 16. The Seder, the traditional meal and ceremony, is celebrated at communal table, often as a reunion of loved ones who travel from long distance to be together.
This year, COVID-19 has meant that some Jewish families had Seders via teleconferencing.
“One of our congregants said that Zoom clearly was not invented by someone with a Jewish family where everyone talks at once,” Alfi said. “But people were happy to see the faces of their loved ones.”
Alfi said her congregation last celebrated together on March 14, when the Bay Area was announcing shelter-in-place orders that Sacramento would soon follow.
“There was a lot of joy in the congregation because we knew it would probably be our last time together for a while,” she said.
Since then, B’nai Israel congregants have watched out for each other.
“Congregants have done outreach to our elderly and we had a couple that had their first baby,” Alfi said. “All of their family is out of town so we had some of our 13-year-old Bat Mitzvah girls bake them cookies and leave it for them on their (front porch).”
To feed is to serve
Though not a religious leader, restaurateur Patrick Mulvaney has been moved by his Catholic faith and his community commitment to feed people in Sacramento .
He’s been delivering hundreds of meals to families of children in the Sacramento City Unified School District.
The sight of cars lined up around corners and filled with needy families has been sobering for a chef who already was known for his philanthropy.
“What we’re seeing in Sacramento is too big for philanthropy,” Mulvaney said. “I’m a tall, fat Irish guy and cops don’t bug me. But what do you do when you’re living in fear?”
That’s what Mulvaney has seen when he delivered food to Sacramento City school kids last week, he said.
He saw fear.
“Each of those kids has a family behind them who are hungry….I knew intellectually that there were (thousands of Sacramento school kids) who qualified for free and reduce lunches,” he said. “I knew that the caloric intake for these kids goes down 30 percent on the weekends. But my heart didn’t know it until I saw all those cars lined up.”
Mulvaney is one of many in Sacramento’s restaurant community mobilized to feed needy people in Sacramento.
“A generosity of spirit is what makes Sacramento great,” he said. “People want to help.”
This holy season, people have helped each other. They have had faith renewed through forced isolation. Many of us have had the time to contemplate what’s important, what matters.
“Religion isn’t theoretical in this situation,” Alfi said.
In the book of Genesis, God asks Cain, where is Abel your brother?
Cain asked, am I my brother’s keeper?
Alfi said COVID-19 has answered that question for us.
“Yes, you are your brother’s keeper…Those teachings are real now in a very tangible way.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2020 at 4:19 PM.
