All through the early months of the pandemic I kept a running list of the things I missed at church. With the goal of reducing transmission risk, we stopped singing the Gloria and we switched to the Apostles' Creed, because it's shorter. There was that whole THING about how Catholics were going to receive communion, and I kept trying to put a brave face on it-- to recognize that my preferences are only preferences, and that protecting the vulnerable is always more important than an individual's preferences, and that people who were really emphatic about their preferences still deserved patience and a listening ear from me.
I don't think I ever put it all together in one post, though I wrote about some of it in this post from July 2020. In a world where a million Americans had died or were dying or were soon to die of COVID, it was a teeny little minor trivial thing to miss the Nicene Creed. But I did miss it.
Today the five of us who are in town this weekend went to church together, and it felt pretty...normal. We sang the Gloria. We said the Nicene Creed: light from light, true God from true God. When I went up to receive communion I knelt down, bare-faced, before my bare-faced pastor, exactly the way I was longing to do it in that old post. Despite the COVID notices that keep plopping into my email inbox at work, the community rate is low and -- for the moment, at any rate -- we are living a cautious grateful approximation of normal.
I am noticing two things lately as we tiptoe back toward something like normal: one is that I remember the shutdown weeks differently in hindsight. I felt so much fear and uncertainty at the time, but in my memories those days are...cozy? almost, weirdly, nostalgia-inducing? Pete says he feels the same way but it still seems odd to me. I guess it's a little like being nostalgic when I see toddler pictures: the hard parts have mostly faded out of my memory, even though I know it was a hard season.
The second thing I am noticing is that my name-retrieval skills are rusty after more than two years of deliberately attending the least crowded Masses. It's great to see people again, and also a little awkward to fumble for names I haven't used in many months. It's interesting to see what my brain spits out as it's trying to get to an actual name-- little nuggets about how the name isn't spelled the way it sounds, or possible alternate names with phonological similarities to the name that has gone walkabout.
Are you noticing this too? Tell me it's not post-COVID brain damage, okay?
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