Chrysalis

This year, you may recall, the central editorial theme of Unirea/Canton is supposed to be liturgy. It seems that nature had other plans.  The pandemic afflicting the planet right now has cut us off from the very thing we wanted to celebrate and teach about in our magazine this year. We have to think a little more deeply to see how we have been affected by the isolation we have endured in the past several months. Ask yourself, “What has the suspension of the public celebration of the liturgy done to my spiritual life? In the life of my family?” For me, the question has been, “What will months-long absence from each other and from the Eucharist do to our Church?”

Many people have offered their prognostications and other guesses about what the “new normal” is or will be in the months, indeed perhaps years, ahead. Others, perhaps too frightened to think about such things, have chosen instead to create a fuss about not being able to live in the past, in other words to live the way they always have, to carry on what they consider to be “normal life,” whatever that may have been for them. But however we may have dealt with it, the kind of isolation we have been living with is quite unknown for us in our generation. However it may turn out, the “new normal” will be abnormal.

And the Church has little guidance to offer, because Christians, who are meant to be together, one with each other, with God and with the entire human race, have been splintered, atomized, kept apart. What we have had to do in terms of suspending public worship and living without being present at a celebration of the Divine Liturgy is not something anyone who is alive today has had to deal with, at least not on a global scale.

Perhaps this has led you to ask, “Where is God in this mess?” Has God gone AWOL? Or is this some kind of message, or worse, some kind of punishment from God? For my part, I have chosen to regard the present moment as a kind of chrysalis, a cocoon that seems lifeless and dormant, but which is in fact carrying within it tremendous transformation. Who knows what the creature within is feeling inside its chrysalis as it undergoes its metamorphosis from larva to adult?

To put it another way, what if the caterpillar, whose life has been little other than crawling around eating leaves, becomes frightened and angry about the cocoon that, like it or not, it is compelled to dwell in without leaving until its transformation is complete? It knows nothing other than what it is to be a caterpillar. It cannot possibly imagine what its life will be like once it can fly.

Perhaps the isolation we have been living with has itself been a kind of sacrament, a liturgy of metamorphosis, a chrysalis moment for the Church. Something is changing within us, both individually and collectively. It must. We who live in the Holy Spirit, with the hope of resurrection in our hearts, cannot possibly know what resurrection will look and feel like when it happens. We know it will not be what we are used to. It will not be “normal.”

And isn’t that why we celebrate the liturgy in the first place? It exists not as an end in itself, but as a pointer toward the life to come, a pale, caterpillar anticipation of the heavenly liturgy, where there will be “neither pain, nor sorrow, nor weeping,” and where no virus, no illness, no death will ever be able to take us away from one another again.