Some context: My regular parish is Assumption Church, the home of the Latin Mass community in Nashville. Mass in the extraordinary form was first offered weekly only about 7 years ago. Now the church is regularly filled to the brim each Sunday. At last year’s Solemnity of the Assumption, in recognition of the parish’s growth, the bishop installed the first diocesan pastor at the parish in 35 years.

But this March has seen a double dose of suffering. Two weeks before the coronavirus shut down Masses for good, Nashville was hit by a tornado that passed about 50 yards from Assumption. I am sure you saw the stories of our pastor rushing into the Church in the middle of the storm to preserve the Blessed Sacrament, and the pictures that showed the resulting destruction of several stained glass windows. Unfortunately the church was not spared from major structural damage. The result is that even before the coronavirus struck here, we were cast out of our church, and we will remain cast out for long after life returns to semi-normal.

And yet Holy Thursday 2020 will be remembered for the rest of my life. In the evening our pastor celebrated privately the Maundy Thursday Mass in the empty parish hall next to the church. He then set up the altar of repose in the grassy yard outdoors next to the hall. And all evening, one by one, parishioners came to our desolated home to keep watch with Christ.

No one stayed too long, so that everyone who wanted to come could find a solitary place with ease and avoid being too close to others or breaking the restrictions on the number of people in gatherings. We knelt in the grass far from each other and prayed, then silently returned to our cars. It was a catharsis after so many weeks away from our damaged church. It struck me that here we were, suffering in this time of sickness and death, and hurting from the damage to our spiritual home that will take many more months to fix–and we gathered in a garden to pray as Jesus did in His agony, praying for an end to the suffering and death, praying with Him for all of us.

As I got up to leave I saw a police car pull up on the street and an officer step out of the car. I wondered for a moment if he was coming to see what this small gathering was about. He entered the grassy yard, and then he knelt in silent prayer. I crossed myself, glanced at the two lighted windows of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart in the facade of the church, and drove home in the dark.

Long time secular reader of your blog checking in here, from the northern edge of the New York City contagion zone.

We’re about as far out of the NYC cluster as you are out of the New Orleans cluster.  Far enough for a little comfort now, but as you know there are no real barriers other than housing density and face to face contact.

First, I submit a photo I took a few days ago, as the full impact of the pandemic was starting to sink in.  We are standing in the front lawn of a Catholic shrine near Canajoharie, NY.  It’s a shrine dedicated to Kateri Tekatwitha, a Mohawk Indian woman who I believe was the first Native American canonized by the Catholic Church.   As you can see, they are doing their level best to maintain their function as a shrine, while avoiding making the current epidemiological situation worse.

Readers, ponder this one for a few moments, whether or not you practice Catholicism, or any organized faith (no on both counts for me).  Tekatwitha was a survivor of a smallpox epidemic that devastated her tribe, killed her immediate family and left her badly disfigured. Her shrine is largely closed, thanks to a rapidly spreading epidemic from a foreign land, to which the current local population has no immunity.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, doesn’t it?

Second, an incident that happened a few minutes before the photo was taken.  I was short a couple of hitch pins, small metal rods that connect my compact tractor to the implements that make it useful during spring planting.  Because the virus, the dealership has closed its showroom and its walk-up parts desk, and now meets its customers in the parking lot.  It’s a smart move.  As the store manager told me, their average farm customer is a 50- or 60- something male, a high risk cohort even before you account for smoking, obesity, and a host of other factors.  I fall squarely in the middle of that risk assessment group, with a couple of added risk factors.  Bravo to ‘em.

So I’m standing in their parking lot, waiting for the parts guy to deliver about 15 dollars worth of totally routine hardware.  Standing next to me is a  50-ish dairy farmer, there to pick up something only a little bit more substantial.  I’d never met him before.

“Never thought I’d be buying tractor parts at a drive-through window”, I say.

“Guess this is the real deal, huh?” he replies, looking at the ground and shaking his head slowly.

Yup, we Yankees are taciturn people.

Later that afternoon, I find out that in a county of roughly 25,000 people, we’ve had 16 confirmed CoVid cases.  At least a few of them are NYC people who own vacation properties up here, places that they bought so they could get away from it all.  In this case, they’ve brought it all with them.

But it turns out one of those local cases is a guy I know, and used to ride the school bus with. I just heard today that he’s out of the hospital, and likely to fully recover.

But yes, this is the real deal.

This is not a Pandemic Diary in the sense of someone suffering with Covid-19, treating them, or living among the populations of infected people. Just a guy in a rural Midwest county with a fairly low infection rate at present that is in his fourth week of serious social distancing. Nearly complete isolation, in fact. My wife and I are empty-nesters that used to see our adult kids, and one sweet granddaughter, regularly. We are all lucky enough to still be employed or in business. I don’t have the challenges that many others are experiencing. But isolation brings its own challenges.

Your post about this Mournful Moment is right on. Loved your account from Alexander Ogorodnikov about his time on death row for the crime of being Christian in Soviet Russia. How terrible would it be to live that life in those times?  How hard would it be to focus on anything but worry about when it will be your turn? And his ability to be a help to others in spite of that is inspiring.

I can see how this disruption and isolation allows Christians to focus their minds about the way they want to serve. I am taking advantage of this weird circumstance to inventory my entire life: how I spend my time, what I eat, what I miss, who I miss, and what I want to change about the life I lived before this stuff. I am choosing to use some of this time to better myself and the way I move through this world.  I am exercising more than ever, eating well, and missing the time I used to spend with my family.

I think it is a universal, human response to this type of threat that we think hard about our lives. About the way we want to live. About the people we want in it. I haven’t had the kind of hard sacrifice of Mr. Ogorodnikov, but my world has been changed in many ways that I don’t like.

I hope that you and yours stay safe. In the spirit of resurrection, I hope that we all come out on the other side with a determination to make ourselves and the world around us a little better.

Making memories. We attended Philly cathedral’s Easter Vigil in our basement television area. My husband wore a suit. He recently shed 25 pounds doing Exodus 90 with some guys from work and church. He looked mighty fine! Several of our daughters donned their finery, as did I. The littles were in comfy play clothes and had blankets on hand because they’ve all fallen asleep during the vigil in the pew before so they knew what to expect and how to prepare.

Archbishop Nelson Perez was the celebrant. He’s very down to earth. There’s a kindness about him that makes me smile and want to call him Uncle Skippy, which I mean only with affection and absolutely no disrespect. I greatly appreciated the formation and formality of Archbishop Chaput. And I welcome the tenderness of Perez. Two very different gents. And what I wouldn’t give to see the thought bubbles of Cathedral Rector Fr. Dennis Gill as he assists at these live streamed Masses!

I hope I don’t sound cheeky. It has been a long Lent, and tonight at the Vigil and in my home the joy was palpable. One of our older daughters is planning to attend a 9am Mass tomorrow with her missionary group via zoom, so all during tonight’s Mass she was up in the kitchen preparing a feast. It was such a delight to sit down with the whole family after the Vigil and enjoy a wonderful meal. Even the sleepy littles made it though they were not nearly as chipper as the big girls. Normally we go to a local diner after the Vigil Mass, but I adore this homebound version of the evening.

Looking forward to celebrating the entire octave of Easter with my dear husband and our lively brood!