BREAD, WINE, COMMUNITY AND CORONAMANIA

On the Sunday, March 2020 night of the week the Scamdemic began, I attended Spanish Catholic mass in New Brunswick, NJ, as I often do.

I know some of the Church’s dark history: the corrupt popes, the selling of indulgences, the crusades and the Church’s role in colonizing Latin America. More recently, there’s been the child abuse scandal. Although this is said to have involved only a tiny fraction of clergy, it could have been ended earlier if the Church hierarchy hadn’t covered it up. Insistence on a celibate or all male priesthood seems problematic.

And there are too many saints, too many arcane rules and too much ceremony.

I’ve also been very disappointed by the Church’s passivity in the face of Covid lockdowns and its support for the masks and shots, via papal pronouncements and sponsorship of vaxx nights, for which I suspect Pharma paid churches latter-day blood money labeled “donations.”

Sometimes I think of joining some other Christian sect. But while most see Catholic teachings on divorce, abortion, contraception and IVF as archaic, I like it that the Church is stubbornly countercultural in these ways. Each of these practices causes profound yet widely overlooked social harm. As I once heard Gore Vidal say, exaggerating to make a point, “The majority is always wrong.”

During Coronamania for example.

Additionally, Catholic churches do some good urban outreach, helping people meet their material and spiritual needs. And while shrinking in number, Catholic schools still educate many working-class kids in settings where the public schools have failed.

Further, as some have noted, if a perfect church existed, why would it make room for imperfect me/us? Many Americans revere selected politicians and celebrities and disregard that their heroes do things they wouldn’t tolerate if done by the non-politicians or celebrities they know. I’m not justifying such blind spots. I’m simply recognizing that many of us make some exceptions because we weigh pros and cons. Many people feel and express some mix of disillusionment and residual loyalty for their religion, spouse/romantic partner, hometown or state, school, favorite sports team or doctor.

Going to Sunday night mass refocuses me ahead of the coming week. Though the preaching is often uninformative and uninspiring, sometimes it hits the mark. Overall, though I can be irreverent and disobedient, I appreciate the reverence and deference that people show in churches. The music can also be pleasing, though typically, only a minority sing along.

Heritage, familiarity and inertia also factor into my religious practice. Above all, while I sometimes worship in other Christian churches, I still go to Catholic mass because my wife does. She’s understatedly magnificent and very important to me.

Some will reasonably criticize the foregoing, qualified apologia. I won’t try to talk anyone out of his/her perceptions or beliefs. Neither my view of Catholicism, nor yours, is the point of this post. It’s just context.

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Instead, I’ll focus on The Church’s role in building community and on a recent experience regarding church, community and some virus.

I could be excommunicated for saying this and if I am, so be it: despite Catholic doctrine, I don’t see the bread and wine offered at communion as the actual body and blood of Christ.

Still, I think communion, especially drinking from the same cup, is an evocative symbol of community. It manifests that those present share the same faith, that we’re all in this world together and that we aren’t afraid of each other even if we’ve never met. We love each other, at least in the abstract.

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On the literally and figuratively dark Sunday March 2020 night before the lockdowns began, an aging, native Polish, but Spanish-speaking, priest told the congregation just before communion that there was a virus going around so we would only receive bread and not drink from the same cup, as we had done for decades.

As I’m not a newswatcher, I had heard about this virus only in the most general sense. It bothered me that the Church was buying into the viral mania. I hated that the fear of other humans was overriding the need for community. I wondered why we should react differently to this virus than we had reacted to any prior virus.

I wanted the Church to show its countercultural streak. But mostly I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that the furor would soon blow over; that people would find any restrictions phony and unpleasant and defy these.

Instead, by mid-week, the churches, schools, gyms and many other public spaces—though not big box or liquor stores—closed. They stayed that way for many months; schools closed for eighteen. While some praiseworthy, exceptional, defiant, non-Catholic churches remained open, internet church replaced in-person gatherings. Ugh.

Eventually, around Christmas, 2020, Catholic and other churches began to reopen, requiring masks. Except for Christmas Eve, I skipped mass—including the simulcasts—until masking ended. When I returned, the tradition of offering each of those around us a sign of peace—a spoken blessing and a handshake—had also been watered down to waving at others, several rows away. Even now, at the Spanish mass, two attendants eagerly, ridiculously offer to squirt sanitizing gel onto entrants’ hands.

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Last week, I went to Sunday morning mass with my wife and two of my adult kids and two-hundred-something other congregants in an old church in DC’s Navy Yard neighborhood. As the choir sang, I stood and joined the communion line. After receiving the unleavened bread, I turned left and walked past the front row. As I did, I was stunned to see a young man along my return path holding and offering the common cup. This was the first time in over five years that I had seen this.

Struck by the sight, I suddenly, unexpectedly began to cry. I took the cup and drank from it.

This wasn’t a profoundly joyful, Jesus-is-with-me moment. Instead, as the pre-communion-no-wine announcement on the eve of Scamdemic over five years prior was my first exposure to Coronamania, I had a flashback to the first week of the viral meltdown and all the craziness and wreckage since then. Sometimes, a person seems to overreact, perhaps because a series of experiences have built a feeling inside of them that led to that moment.

That’s how it was for me. These were tears of rage about five-plus years of relentless government and media lies, widespread opportunism and gullibility and others seeing their fellow humans as carriers of disease. About legions of adults zealously obeying absurd rules as if they were six-year-olds playing Cooties. About lonely old folks being sequestered or hiding themselves in senior apartments and others who died alone in hospitals, medicated or ventilated to death. About the life-altering damage done to kids and young adults, including some I know, who had experienced so much isolation and disruption and who had, out of desperation for employment and human company, succumbed to pressure and taken shots that have done, and will likely still do, much harm. About the authoritarianism and censorship that haven’t ever clearly ended. And for which no one has been held accountable or apologized. As the bumper sticker says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

Though the Scamdemic had often exasperated me, this was the first time I got around to crying about it. I didn’t cry for long. I was too angry for that.

Life is hard enough under normal conditions. Sometimes, the extra weight of mass-scale mania made feel that God had abandoned humanity. And during the lockdowns and Vaxxfest, I didn’t love my neighbors, near or far, who considered themselves smart and skeptical but bought or exploited an obvious Scam and demanded that everyone else share their delusion.

Under other circumstances, seeing a long overdue sign of normalcy and squirting some tears could have been cathartic. It might have delineated past from present and told me that this ordeal was over.

But I felt no peace. I’m still pissed that my government and the media pulled off a massive scam, and that the NPI and shot supporters either say “we didn’t know” or still assert—and sometimes even seem to believe—that these measures were good ideas. I’m angry the whole thing is being memory-holed by those who perpetrated or embraced it. Though because much of the damage is permanent, forgetting will require sustained, deliberate ignorance.

Other churches I’ve been to in the past year still haven’t returned to sharing the cup. If people believe they’re drinking the blood of the Son of God, why fear a virus?

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This week, I read Lieutenant Dangerous, a memoir written in 2021 by Jeff Danziger, an American Vietnam War veteran. Danziger begins his book thusly:

It has now been more than forty-five years since my tour in Vietnam in the army, a period in which I thought I would think about the war less and less. The opposite is true. These days I wonder how such a thing could have happened, not just to me but to the United States as a whole. I am reminded from time to time when I am talking with younger people, and I have to force myself not to talk about the war. I have to make an almost physical effort to mention the war only in passing, and to go on to other subjects.

Five years after it began, I feel the same way about the Scamdemic as Danziger feels about the Vietnam War. I wonder how such a thing could have happened, not just to me but to the United States as a whole. Like Lieutenant Dangerous, I’ll probably never accept what happened. As he did, I’ve felt compelled to continually consider and record what I experienced and saw. And to share my memories and perspectives and compile these in indelible form.

Above all, Lieutenant Dangerous and I both wished we could travel back in time and convince everyone who initially urged or endorsed these senseless interventions to remain calm, think critically and decline to succumb to irrational fear, propaganda or peer pressure. This includes Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and nearly every federal, state and local executive, legislator or bureaucrat—certainly every Democrat—and media, sports or entertainment figure. Not locking down was an easy call. But somehow, nearly all supported doing so.

Unlike Lieutenant Dangerous, I don’t have 45 more years on this Earth to think about Coronamania. And I spontaneously bring the Scamdemic up in conversation whenever I can. Though most still aren’t willing to engage or take any responsibility for any of it.