On March 19th, 2020, governor Gavin Newsom asked California residents to shelter in place. Daily headlines reminded us of widespread illness, death, and loss as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the globe. Schools and businesses closed their doors. Students started learning remotely; some in “pods,” some in isolation. Some people began working from home, some people lost their jobs. Places of worship also closed their doors and many shifted to online religious services. In the midst of disruption and vulnerability, how did people experience faith and religious belonging?
In the midst of transitioning from the pandemic to whatever a post-pandemic reality might look like, the Society of Jesus and their companions have been celebrating the Ignatian year. The Ignatian year marks 500 years after St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish nobleman experienced a profound turning point in his life. In a battle with French forces, a cannonball shattered his leg. Recovering from that brutal war, bored in bed, he read the popular Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and a traditional Lives of the Saints. The cannonball disrupted what Ignatius thought his life would be about. The boredom, extra time, and loneliness in which he turned to these two books made him want to radically change his life.
On one hand, it was a particular decision to change his life but, on the other hand, Ignatius needed a long time to recover from the trauma of his shattered leg and his shattered dreams. From his vulnerability, he embarked on a journey — a pilgrimage. Perhaps, the most important stage of Ignatius’s pilgrimage occurred in the obscure small town of Manresa, where a cave became his place of prayer. With his life torn and vulnerable, he needed hours of prayer in the cave. He entered the cave not understanding much of how his incredible vulnerability and being sick, and at the same time his fascinating mystical awareness in his weakness, could give rise to a renewed understanding of Christianity.
He spent eleven months in the Manresa cave — praying, writing, finding consolation, but also experiencing profound despair. Can the journey of Ignatius teach us anything about the collective journey of humanity through the pandemic? What did that vulnerability of Ignatius in the cave and of ourselves during the pandemic teach us? The reflections we present here spring from a questioning, searching community that has not yet healed from the trauma of a shattered understanding of the modern world and the practice of faith in it. What insights and tools might our cave experience provide us?
Convinced that theology emerges out of concrete experience, we set out to explore how one’s experience of church during the pandemic might inform Catholic ecclesiology (theological understanding of the Church), particularly in this synodal period. We invited members of a local parish to share their experiences through an electronic survey and semi-structured interviews. The goal of this study is not to present generalizable findings but rather to identify recurring themes for theological reflection, which we will pursue together with volunteer parishioners.
Going online and going within
Of the 36 self-selected respondents to the online survey, 31 reported participating in livestream mass. All of the 11 interviewees participated in livestream mass during the months when in-person worship was not an option. The majority of respondents identified other spiritual and/or religious practices that they embraced during the pandemic. These include prayer at home, yoga, meditation, praying the rosary, reading for personal and/or spiritual growth, and spending time in nature. For a number of respondents, the pandemic has been a period of introspection, slowing down, more frequent prayer, meditation, and personal growth / learning. Several respondents said that the pandemic deepened or strengthened their faith, while others said that the suffering associated with the pandemic has tested or challenged their faith.
Longing for connection and discovering new ways to connect
When we asked people “what, if anything, did you miss when in-person liturgy was not possible”, the most frequent response was related to a particular way of relating to people: community, fellowship, relationship, being physically with others, interactions with the community, seeing friends, seeing parishioners. A number of respondents also named the Eucharist as something they missed. At the same time, more than one participant reported feeling surprised that they did not miss the Eucharist as much as they would have anticipated. Some people appreciated the “drive-up” Eucharist offered outside of the church on Sundays while others did not feel inclined to receive the Eucharist that way. One respondent said “to go on a sidewalk and receive communion, just doesn’t do it for me. It’s not my idea of the Eucharist because to me, the Eucharist is a banquet.” Several people said they missed the music, or specifically singing together in the church. One respondent named the importance of music in this way “…you know you got the full experience of being together as a community worshiping. I think music is a big part of that for me. Singing with everyone is incredibly important as far as I’m concerned. I think that’s a very important form of prayer and that you can’t do virtually.”
The importance of community and connection emerged as a recurring theme. However, we found that people experienced community in different ways during the pandemic. Some people experienced livestream as a positive way to connect with others and some appreciated the access that remote participation afforded them while others reported being tired of virtual engagement or “zoomed out.” A few participants described coordinating participation in the livestream mass with family members in other locations. Some respondents described how they connected with the family members in their immediate household during the livestream. One person we interviewed described a ritual of baking on Sunday morning to prepare for the at-home livestream mass. One respondent named an “intimate sharing of spirituality and prayer with my husband as we together attended the livestream mass within our home.”
Experiencing church in the particular
Among the diverse experiences of community and church, we were struck by the longing for the particular over the general or abstract. For example, a few respondents said it mattered to them that they were with their own parish –– seeing familiar people, connecting in the live chat, texting at the sign of peace. When respondents did refer to the Church beyond their own parish, they tended to focus on the bishops/the hierarchy and usually did so with disappointment or frustration. We also observed, within a few themes that emerged, the significance of physical, embodied ways of being in community –– the longing for sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the desire to sing, not in one’s living room, but with others in the church. We observed that people forged religious rituals in their homes and cultivated individual spiritual practices that were sustaining and it was clear to us that most participants longed for the experience that is embodied and communal.
At this point we are not clear what the survey, the interviews, and the theological reflection groups might teach us in their entirety, but we are sure that remembering our own and others’ life and religious imagination during COVID is key. As we have reported above, the importance of community and the importance of embodied communication in sacred contexts as much as in partnerships and family seem at the heart of many experiences. To deepen our understanding of this, we return once more to Ignatius’s cave.
It was not a lone hero who came out of the incredibly painful and vulnerable experience in Manresa, with such long times in the cave each day. It was an Ignatius utterly dependent on the embodied presence of grace through others when he nearly died a couple of times of serious illnesses and when he was not able to get out of the darkness by himself. Ignatius had dreamed of himself as the lone, self-sustained hero rescuing the queen and her princess and ended up completely dependent on others’ compassion, healing touch, caring, and vision.
Similarly, it seems clear that during COVID there was not one way or another, but a variety of ways responding to the new imagination that emerged in the extremely vulnerable circumstances of those pandemic years. We might not know what the insights for the future will be at this point, but as the German political theologian Johan Baptist Metz insisted, there will be no future without dangerous memories. Not memories of “the good old days,” but memories that endanger our temptation to just get “back to normal, ” to continue life “unaffected,” or to focus on reinstating the old “status quos.” Dangerous memories that burn inside and ask, who died and why? Dangerous memories that remember the struggles and the pain. Dangerous memories of the experience of God in the suffering and beauty surrounding all. Not letting go of dangerous memories is a path into a more compassionate and just future. This is what Ignatius learned in Manresa. It found its way into his Spiritual Exercises, which present an incarnate God found in human faces and sacred embodied gestures. This theological research, which is ongoing, wants to play a part in not letting go of the central dangerous memory of COVID-19 for an embodied future for the society and the Church.
Erin Brigham is the Executive Director of the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition at the University of San Francisco. She earned her PhD in systematic and philosophical theology at the Graduate Theological Union in 2010 and continues to research in the areas of Catholic public theology and social thought as well as post-conciliar ecclesiology and ecumenism. Her books include Sustaining the Hope for Unity: Ecumenical Dialogue in a Postmodern World (Liturgical Press, 2012), See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning (Anselm Academic Press, 2013. Revised Edition, 2018), Church as Field Hospital: Toward an Ecclesiology of Sanctuary (Liturgical Press, 2022), and co-edited with Mary Johnson, Solidarity Toward the Common Good: Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition (Paulist Press, forthcoming 2022).
Julia De Prinz, VDMF is a German Verbum Dei sister who ministers at their San Francisco downtown location and at their spirituality center out in Tracy, California. She is an adjunct professor for Spirituality at JST-SCU at Berkeley, where she is on the Core-doctoral faculty at the GTU and is on the faculty at Instituto San Pablo Apostle, Loeches/Madrid, Spain. Her research is in hermeneutics, aesthetics, biblical spirituality and political theology. She supports the Union of International Superiors (UISG) in Rome as a theological advisor, promoting the theological studies of religious sisters. Recently, she assumed a part-time position at the Ignatian Spiritual Life Center at Saint Agnes, San Francisco.
