Empty Churches and the Empty Sepulcher
Originally written April 11, 2020
This Easter will been very different for a majority of Christians. The biggest feast day of the Church has been moved from sanctuaries all over the world into the living rooms and makeshift chapels in the faithful’s homes. The most important gathering of Christians has been delegated away from public places of worship, to help curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Beyond religious gatherings, many other areas of our lives have been overtaken by solitude. Many people are working from home or have been furloughed, the elderly and immunocompromised are quarantined in nursing homes and hospitals without visitation, and those suffering from COVID19 must die without their family by their bedside. Amidst all this loneliness and emptiness, there are lessons we can learn about thankfulness and generosity.
The image of innumerable empty churches this Easter Sunday, with priests and pastors celebrating mass and preaching to empty pews, is eerie. Normally it is hard to find a spot to sit in Easter liturgies and services because there are so many people who come to participate in the celebration. Churches gather, families and friends share meals, and children hunt for plastic eggs filled with goodies. But this year, all are confined to celebrate within their homes and with those immediately around them.
However, when we tune into our churches’ live streams today, we should remember the invisible, universal Church who is celebrating Easter with us. The saints gone before us, the angels in heaven, and all believers around the world, gather to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the salvation of God’s creation. In the midst of all our suffering, fear, and emptiness, these hollow sanctuaries should be a oxymoronic expression of the abundance of souls celebrating the feast of Easter.
Through these months since many countries and states have imposed quarantines, hopefully we have become more aware of the importance of personal religious practices. Now that we do not have the impetus to go to religious gatherings and Sunday liturgies or services, we have to put extra effort into practicing our faith. Ironically, with the convenience of being able to tune into limitless religious resources from our beds or couches, it has also become easier to make excuses that we do not have to participate in our faith at these times. I myself have found it easier to do many other things than tune into live streamed religious events; and, when I do, I am much more easily distracted than I would be if I were there in person. Nonetheless, hopefully we have become aware of the limitless resources of religious goods that we can receive in books or on our computers and phones. After this pandemic passes, we have no excuse for our religious sloth because we should remember how much easy access we have to resources for our faith.
Additionally, hopefully in this crisis we have spent time praying and developing our faith with those with whom we live. Now that we are kept from going to communal gatherings, we are forced to practice our faith in the micro-societies of our families and homes. We can see this as a negative consequence; or, we can view it as a return to the way in which the early Church functioned. Many ancient Christian practices took place in the homes of the faithful. Not only was it a way to avoid public persecution, but it fostered a close community day in and day out. Going forward, we should not forget the importance of daily prayer within our homes. Only by sanctifying our domestic communities can we evangelize the greater society.
I have often thought that you can never really be thankful for something until you have lost it. You can only appreciate the goodness of something until it is gone, by coming to realize its value through its absence. In the same way, there have been many things that we have lost through the social distancing recommendations of this pandemic time. We have lost receiving the Sacraments in person, meeting as a religious community, and giving physically through volunteer events. However, we should be thankful for what we still have: our religious freedom to practice our faith without persecution, our clergy who tirelessly work to deliver spiritual teaching, and our God who does not stop bestowing graces on us amidst our temporal suffering.
When we are allowed to return to some semblance of normalcy, we should more strongly embrace those things which we currently lack. We should partake in the Sacraments of mass and confession more frequently. We should visit the Blessed Sacrament and spend time in prayer more often. We should seek out religious groups that foster our faith more fervently. We should support our clergy and churches more regularly with our gifts of our time, talent, and treasure. And, we should fight for the right of every human being to practice their faith without persecution.
On Holy Thursday, we celebrated the institution of the Eucharist. The word comes from Greek, meaning “thankfulness.” On Easter we celebrate, with an abundance of gratitude, our eternal salvation, purchased for us through the death and resurrection of our Lord. The current sufferings that we are going through fade away in comparison with the light of Christ, which shines through the darkness of sin and death.
The empty churches this Easter remind us of the empty sepulcher, from which Jesus rose. The barren tomb is a good thing. Although vacant places of worship are necessary currently, they remind us that the Church exists beyond the physical boundaries of the sanctuary walls; they make us thankful for the freedoms, virtual communities, and graces that we continue to have during this present suffering; and, hopefully they will encourage many to run back to fill these places of worship and to go out to evangelize the world when the pandemic is over, just as the women who visited the tomb on Easter morning ran to tell the apostles of the Good News of Jesus‘s resurrection.
