It was fall 2020, covid-19 case counts were about to explode, and Uma Gaffney had just started work as a middle school teacher in Minneapolis.
“It was such a hard time to be a teacher,” she recalled. Remote learning was the order of the day, and students and teachers were struggling in equal measure to adjust. “I think about all the ways I wish I could have done better.”
Gaffney, 26, who has since quit teaching to study medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, was one of more than 200 parishioners who filled the pews of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood Sunday for a covid-19 remembrance service. It was designed as “a funeral for the pandemic,” in the words of the Rev. Jonathon Jensen, the rector of Calvary.
“Why have we, as a Church and as a congregation, never marked the end of the pandemic in a ritual or liturgical way?” Jensen wrote to parishioners in January, announcing the special service and seeking suggestions for what to include. “This is what we are good at doing.”
More than 1.2 million Americans have died of covid since widespread transmission began in 2020, and at least 54,000 have died in Pennsylvania.
The structure of Sunday’s service was typical for an 11 a.m. Eucharist during Lent at Calvary. The difference was in the declared intention — “to acknowledge the pandemic’s costs to the entire human family, and to pray for those who lost their lives in it, those who are still suffering its effects, and all of us whose lives have been marked by it” — and certain visual cues.
The church’s main aisle was adorned with signs of the times from 2020 (“Please Keep Your Distance. Thank You”). In the processional entrance, clergy and assisting lay members wore masks, as did the more than 30 members of the choir. For the first half of the service, the choir sang from the pews — as they did during the restricted, social-distancing days of the pandemic.
The Bible readings and Gospel selection were chosen by Calvary to amplify the themes of sickness and healing.
Jensen’s sermon opened with a chronology: “It was only supposed to be a few weeks. That turned into a few months. Then it was a few years and (it) never completely disappeared.” As he recounted the progression of the pandemic, he reflected on the human losses — the sickness and death of loved ones, missed or inadequate schooling, curtailed weddings or never-held funerals, isolation and the deterioration of social bonds.
“We can’t fix the political divide between people or decreasing trust in institutions, but we can help heal people,” he said. “That is the intention of today’s worship. To mark this period of five years is to try to make some sense of it and make it part of the healing process.”
Jensen addressed the “personal, communal and societal emotional traumas in the midst of physical ones. We have been taught, unintentionally, to live in fear all the time. Fear of one another, fear of the unknown or the next pandemic, even fear of death.” Turning to the church’s mission, he asserted that “this is not the life God desires for us. We are not called to live in fear but live in hope in the resurrection life promised.”
In the Prayers of the People part of the service, special attention was paid to health care workers, public health researchers, business owners, children who missed learning and “the loss of public trust.”
Jon Mazur, a parishioner and choir member, suffered profound loss — his brother died of covid-19. In addition, Mazur endured a serious bout of the virus, spending 10 days in an intensive care unit. His legs atrophied so badly as he fought for his life in a hospital bed that, upon returning home with an oxygen tank, he had to learn to walk again.
The physical scars of illness have mostly faded for the 66-year-old. The emotional ones, less so.
“By hearing this sermon, we got to put it behind us a little bit,” he said.
Unlike many trying national experiences, like 9/11, the pandemic is challenging to grasp as a singular event, noted parishioner Vanessa Sterling, 55. “We like to not talk about it and not think about it,” she said.
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Sterling, a member of the church’s vestry, helped plant the idea of the service with Jensen. She saw a covid-focused service as a way to shake the lingering “ambient anger,” as she put it, caused by the pandemic.
Of course, the virus is not gone. It has just receded to the back of the collective consciousness as vaccines and treatments have made an infection less dangerous than it once was. Today, many might contract covid-19 and never suspect it or seek testing to confirm it. Public health agencies have generally ceased reporting, anyway.
But there is several years of distance from the worst of it, and that’s enough for much of the congregation to take stock of their feelings.
“Today was good for helping me forgive myself,” Gaffney said.
Like every week, this Calvary 11 a.m. service was livestreamed and posted to the church’s YouTube channel, available via calvarypgh.org.