May 1

So you guys, the pandemic is doing a weird thing to my brain. It's so unusual for me to talk to people outside my family that I'm having surges of social anxiety when I do. Chatting with a neighbor from across the street? After I end the conversation I think to myself, "Wait, was that rude? Was that a reasonable way to end the conversation? WHAT IF I DON'T REMEMBER HOW TO DO THAT NOW THAT MY DAYS ARE PRETTY MUCH ONE ENDLESS CONVERSATION WITH THE SAME PEOPLE?!"

I have a couple of innocuous posts in my drafts folder -- I started them and then had a surge of blog anxiety, which is also weird. So I am going to paste the one from Sunday into this post, and then I am going to post regularly this month, and we will see whether I end the month feeling like I know how to talk to people outside my family again or like we should move to a barbed-wire-encircled prepper compound with our stores of lentils.

Today before our family version of the liturgy of the Word we were talking about what the return to church might look like. Joe was shaking his head, saying communion is going to be hard to figure out, no matter how much you reconfigure the pews. "There's liturgical precedent for using tongs," I said. "Or maybe we could have, like, a robot Eucharistic minister that picks up one host from the ciborium, swings its boom around, and drops it into the communicant's palm so the priest doesn't have to make contact."

"Is there liturgical precedent for that?" Elwood wanted to know.

Pete suggested that maybe there could be a liturgical spatula that would allow the celebrant to propel the hosts toward the communicants, who would have to catch them in their mouths, like the Eucharistic version of a teppanyaki restaurant. "Guys," I said sternly, "we're talking about the BODY of CHRIST." "Right," said Joe, "that's why it's really really important that you catch it. It's like High-Stakes Jesus Hibachi." Pete suggested that perhaps all attendees could be fitted with face cones to assist with the catching.

I am sure our bishop would love to hear about our ideas for new liturgical norms.