Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors,
that the King of Glory may come in.
Psalm 24:7
As a lover of words and one for whom working with words occupies a great deal of time, I have been both amused and infuriated by the vocabulary that has emerged to describe our various experiences with and rules surrounding Covid-19. One my “favorite” products of this pandemic is the absurd oxymoron “social distancing.” Another is the title of this essay: “opening up.” Whenever I hear this, I get a smirk on my face and the voice of the character Inigo Montoya in the film “The Princess Bride” sounds in the back of my head saying: “I do not think it means what you think it does.”
The way that “opening-up” is used in the ongoing discussion of what we can and can’t do in the face of this global pandemic suggests that there is someone in charge who has the power to declare the doors open and thus invite and expect everyone to come rushing in to fill the spaces that they vacated in March. Imagine what happens when Disneyland opens for the day or what happens at Walmart on Black Friday and you have the picture that the phrase “opening up” conjures. Authorities like Mickey Mouse or the man wearing the blue vest swing wide the gate and we all come streaming in. Just say the word. Wave us in and we’ll come back inside the sanctuary, or the tavern, or the stadium.
The problem with this is that merely opening the door, will not open things up. There is also that dicey little matter of who will decide to come back inside.
When I was a kid, I was always organizing clubs among the kids in the neighborhood. But what I discovered about these various clubs was that it was hard to get us together beyond the first organizational meeting. As a remedy I devised a signal that was supposed to produce the effect of calling in the other kids for a meeting; a signal similar to how the bell or whistle at a small town fire station would call in the volunteer fire fighters. In my case that noise was the sound of a steel rod hitting the 3-inch pipe that held up the clothesline in our back yard. It was a pretty loud sound; but I can’t remember an occasion where banging on that pipe produced its desired effect. The gates of the club house were declared open, but no one came streaming in.
There are actually two problems with using the phrase “opening up” to describe the return to worship in our sanctuary. The first is that people need to be ready to come back. The second is that the phrase all but ignores the truth of what we have been doing since we stopped meeting in the sanctuary in March. We have not been closed. Worship has continued. Connections between us continue to be made. In fact, in some surprising ways worship has become more interactive and new connections are being made that would not have been made in the narthex. Granted there are deficiencies in this new way of worshipping and connecting. And hands down, I would prefer to be back in that room together. But we won’t be back there until we are fully back there and the way we will get back there will not simply be when the session votes or the pastor waves in the streaming throngs, but when the entire congregation decides to walk in the doors. And to put a finer edge on it, we will return to that space changed. We won’t simply come back to what was.
As a member of the Session pointed out at our last meeting, the return to our sanctuary will no doubt be an organic thing. We will grow into it gradually. This is why the session voted recently to install video equipment in the sanctuary that will allow us to accommodate worshippers who are both in the sanctuary and attending online. With this new equipment, which should be installed sometime in late October, we will be able to connect the two congregations in one service. What’s more, this equipment will enable us to continue to welcome our online worshippers into our sanctuary long after Covid-19 ceases to be a live concern.
Covid-19 has robbed us of a number of things, but it has not taken away our power open our hearts to God and one another. We can still hear and respond to the psalmist’s call to lift up our heads and open the doors of our lives to the God who has chosen to be in our midst. God’s offer of love and gift of abundant life are not going to be withdrawn. So, let’s move forward trusting these promises and keep our hearts open to God.
David Rohrer
10/01/2020