All the parishes of the Orthodox Church in America are having the Divine Liturgy today, but parishioners have been asked to stay home, except for a skeleton crew — just enough to celebrate the liturgy. In our little mission parish in Baton Rouge, the priest (obviously) was there, as were a couple of chanters in the choir, a reader, an altar server, and one parishioner.

I appreciated that we were going to livestream the services on Facebook, but I expected them to be unpleasant. There is no substitute for being there. This morning, my wife sat down in the living room with her laptop perching on a stack of books I had been using this past week for research, atop the coffee table, and connected to the livestream. I sat in the kitchen working on my book.

She connected to the pre-liturgy prayers. I could hear them in the next room, and could not concentrate on my work, because I kept saying them in my mind. Finally I decided that it would do me good to go in there and simply be present for the prayers and the liturgy. So I sat down on the couch with my wife and the dog Roscoe — his first Divine Liturgy — and prayed along. Our daughter Nora woke up shortly after the liturgy started, and joined us:

It was an unexpected delight to have our little friend with us during the liturgy:

I don’t know how it would be for people in other traditions, but for us Orthodox, we all know the complex liturgy so well that even just hearing it over the computer, with the familiar choir voices, and the voice of our priest chanting the lines that have been sedimented into our bones, was strangely galvanizing. I say “strangely,” because in no way did I expect to be so moved by watching the liturgy on the screen, and praying along with it.

It would not have been like that (for me) had we been watching someone other Orthodox parish’s liturgy. I’m sure that, having come to it with no expectations, I would have been surprised and pleased by how much it meant to me, but it still wouldn’t have been the same thing as liturgy with my church community.

In his sermon, Father spoke in a proper Lenten spirit, encouraging us to interpret this disruption in our normal worship as an opportunity to repent. He said that all of us who have missed church in the past without a good reason should reflect on that, and turn away from the attitude that allowed us to act that way. We take so much for granted, he said. None of us like the fact that we can’t come to church right now, because of the virus, but let this period of deprivation be for our salvation, by driving us to deeper conversion — including a more faithful devotion to communal and liturgical prayer.

As he said that, I thought about this passage from Walker Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.

The plain old Divine Liturgy, held in a small, poor mission church that has to rent commercial space for worship, sure looks and feels different when a global pandemic has forced you to watch it remotely, via Facebook, as you pray for all those who are sick and dying, and who will soon be sick and dying when the plague flames into a consuming fire in the weeks to come.

I can hardly wait until the day when we are able to gather for liturgy together again. There really is no satisfying substitute for being there — but now I know we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough during a time of duress. When we see each other again, will we all be there — even our oldest members? Will all the people whose presence I might have taken for granted be present at the other end of our journey through this valley of the shadow of death? Please God, let it be so. Upon our return, it won’t look the same — and that is one blessing to come out of a hard time.

Did you observe your church’s services this morning via the Internet? If so, what was it like?