Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bishop Hughes reflects on the challenges we overcame together, and how that experience prepared us for the new challenges we face today. (Time: 5:00.)
Video Transcript
This is Bishop Hughes in the Diocese of Newark. This past Sunday marked the five-year anniversary of the start of pandemic in our diocese. It was five years ago this Sunday, with about 48 hours’ notice, that all of our churches began to refrain or fast from gathering together to worship on site in their buildings. They had 48 hours to get online, and most of us did not have that equipment. It was a scurried, hurried, frantic start, and people got online any way that they could, whether it was YouTube or Facebook or Zoom – however they did it, our churches were worshiping online that Sunday. I would say that Sunday was not our best moment online. It was certainly bumpy, but we were there. We were together.
That was our first lesson of pandemic: how to change quickly, and how to stay together. Pandemic was hard on us. There were so many losses, many of them tragic, not all of them to COVID, but we were bereft, especially because funerals could only have 10 people attend. So there was not that time for friends and family to gather in an extended way and to remember together the person who left us. We still feel that loss of the year and a half that funerals were that small, even though memorial services waited, we still feel that loss.
I am also aware that when we take the time to look back at those pandemic times, we can see the many ways that we were shaped by God into being the people that we needed to be to get through pandemic, not just for ourselves, but to make sure that our neighbors got through pandemic too. First of all, it was the use of that word – that our neighbors weren’t just the people in our churches or just the people next door to our churches – that that word “neighbor” became very expansive. It became all people. It became all people that belong to God, and that means everybody, because everybody belongs to God. It was important to us that no one go hungry. We did everything we could to make sure that people had food wherever they were in northern New Jersey, that there was no loss that way. We made sure that people had friendship, that they had company, conversations that took place on front porches or through a window; many the phone call or online gatherings. People found ways to stay in touch with people, to get Communion to people, to pray for people. We learned how important that was.
We also learned how to face hard things. It wasn’t just the hardships of COVID we had to face and our own personal losses, but we faced those racial killings. We didn’t try to name them something else. We didn’t ignore them. We faced them as harsh and as shameful and as hard as they were. We looked directly at them, and then we asked ourselves, what is God calling us to do? And we got busy in terms of making sure that people were safe, everywhere that we have churches, and everywhere that we go, that that has been important to us. It’s important for us to remember not only the losses and the people that, whose memories that we hold dear, but to remember how we grew, how we grew as faithful people who could stand on our feet, who could change and change quickly, who could make sure that people felt connected, make sure people had food, make sure people knew that they had company and that they had care and they could face hard things. All of this is important because it prepared us for the moment that we are facing now.
There is trouble in our land, there is trouble in our world, and it is going to take strong people, faithful people, people who can face the truth, people who care about their neighbors and people who see their neighbors as being people all over the whole wide world. It is going to take people like that, people who came through a pandemic, not by their own will or might, but by the grace of God. People who by God’s grace, also grew to be people who are strong enough, who are faithful enough, and who are brave enough to face this present and the future before us. Remember who you are.
