Mary Wisniewski: Back to church: The weird, comforting feeling of being together again in the COVID-19 era

Then we go up front during Communion, to direct traffic and spray people’s hands again with another, quick-drying sanitizer before they receive the Eucharist. While distributing the host, the pastor wears both a mask and a clear plastic face shield, so he looks like a cross between a cleric and a Blackhawks goalie.

Churches, like grocery stores, are decorated coronavirus-style – with duct tape on the floors telling you how far to stand apart, and which direction to go. In our parish, blue duct-tape arrows point you up the center aisle toward the altar – and green tape marks 6-foot distances. On the side aisles, arrows made of yellow tape point you the way out. On the pews, blue tape crosses mark which pews can be used and which can’t.

After Mass, more masked volunteers show up to clean the pews where people have sat, and the door handles they touched. Everywhere is the smell of disinfectant.

When I’m not on hand-sanitizer duty, I cantor, singing from the ambo. But I miss the choir – who knows when we can gather again? It’s strange to look out on all those masked faces, as though we were holding service in a typhoid ward, or during the London Blitz. I wonder if people are singing along silently, in their heads.

Sitting in the hot church on a recent Sunday with my mask, fanning myself with the petitions, I remembered a nun I had in grade school, Sister Harriet, a tough old bird with a gift for allegory. She used to compare the Eucharist to a diamond.

She told us, “It doesn’t matter what you do with a diamond – it’s still a diamond. You can mount it in a beautiful ring, surrounded with rubies, or you can stick it onto a piece of cardboard with Scotch tape, and it’s still a diamond, just presented in a different way. You can have Mass in a cathedral with gold chalices and a big choir and everyone dressed up, or you can have it in a tent in the jungle with everyone in rags – the Eucharist is the same. That’s what’s important.”