News from the Congregation May 8, 2020
Jennifer Allen on Her Wisdom Year Residency; Plagues Past and Present; Sunday Programming (Job Bible Study, Worship Service, Coffee Half-Hour, Adult Formation Series on the Daily Office) YESS Bible Study, Reading Group, Compline, #GivingTuesdayNow!, Poor People's Campaign Digital March, Voices from the Cathedral Podcast
Wisdom Year Resident Jennifer Allen
This week's message is a reflection that Wisdom Year Resident Jennifer Allen wrote for members of her seminary community. Since mid-March, Jennifer has been working from home in Kansas, and she has been doing a wonderful job teaching the Next Step class, providing pastoral care, and helping us re-think how to do "virtual church."
This week, Jennifer received the happy news that the date of her ordination to the transitional diaconate has been set for Saturday, June 13. As details are set, we will share them with you.
Jennifer will be the preacher for the worship service this Sunday, May 10.
- The Rev. Canon Steven Lee
***
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that my time in seminary ended in unexpected ways. This semester began as expected, I balanced my time between Chapel, my Wisdom Year placement at the Cathedral Congregation of Saint Saviour and working in the library on my thesis and biblical studies capstone. It was busy but felt well-balanced. I had successfully completed General Ordination Exams, and I was beginning to feel the edge of sorrow, knowing my time in the community I had come to love was ending soon.
I knew about coronavirus, but I had no reference point to really understand how life was about to change. I had concluded that I would be able to ride a bike up to the Cathedral to continue working there and really didn’t think that I would need to do anything more serious than avoiding public transportation, and being careful at the store. I was determined to stay on campus, continue my research on my thesis and capstone, and ride it all out.
Within 24 hours of my bike riding decision, the Cathedral had stopped in person worship services. Then classes at General went from optionally online to fully online. Chapel services were moved outside. Our community lunches became boxed lunches picked up hurriedly. I was standing outside for Evening Prayer, in a circle, six feet apart from anyone else when the full realization finally broke through. This was going to be a long and life-changing experience. There was a very real potential that people I know and love might die. Everything had all changed so fast, and it was continuing to change fast. States were talking about closing their borders. Hotels were closing their doors. When my son texted me, asking what “shelter-in-place” meant, I googled it. I realized at that moment that if I stayed in New York, I might not be able to get home to Kansas for a very long time.
I decided to rent a car, pack up what stuff I thought I would need (especially my cat, Stormy) and drive to Kansas. I walked across the hall to tell a classmate. I had been operating on autopilot, not really thinking about meaning, just thinking about getting home. But when I saw the look on her face, I knew that this was going to be really hard. I recognized that the endings we thought were months away had just arrived suddenly, unexpectedly. There was no transition, no ceremonial closure, just the end. I hate saying good-byes. I’m the one at the party who says, “oh, it’s time for me to go” repeatedly until I’m the last one to leave. So I said, “come with me.” I ended up driving her to Madison, WI. The trip helped create a little transition for our relationship and for my transition back to my home, husband, and life in Kansas.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being home with my husband. The separation for seminary was incredibly difficult. And switching the plan of coming home in early June to coming home in March was also difficult. There was no opportunity for us to emotionally prepare to recombine our stuff, our schedules and our priorities. And when I was six hours from home, a friend sent me an article stating that the state of Kansas expected me to maintain a self-imposed quarantine for two weeks after returning home. For two weeks, I stayed in the guest room, feeling like I had made it halfway home. It ended up being a good thing. We got the chance to get to know one another again, from a bit of a distance. The state imposed a transition I hadn’t expected, I really hated, but I have learned to appreciate now that I am out of quarantine.
One of the more difficult challenges has been that I had relatively few in person classes before all of this began. I have one class which meets regularly, and another which only meets monthly. I wouldn’t have felt the lack of contact as acutely back on campus, because running into people at lunch, in Chapel, at the library, or on the sidewalk would have kept me connected. But none of that is replicated in our online world, really. I miss those chance encounters.
One of the greatest joys has been the online community with the Congregation of St. Saviour. Brilliantly they decided to hold online coffee hour. Now, with Zoom, everyone has a nametag! I love that hour on Sundays of visiting and catching up. The worship is lovely, the music is beautiful, and every week the streaming seems to get better. But the coffee hour has been my lifeline.
I’m not sure that I could have reflected on this period even two weeks ago. But as we approach what should have been the end of my time at General, it’s a little easier to look back on the first days of the shut-down. It’s less painful to reflect on the distance between Kansas and New York now that we have gotten the hang of Zoom, we know that our graduation ceremony will happen in May 2021, and it seems possible to continue relationships that were so suddenly restricted by the pandemic. I’m continuing to worship with my beloved community at the Congregation of St. Saviour, and my husband has been joining some of the services. I’m getting my thesis and capstone done, although it has been painfully slow work. And, I see the light of new ministry in Kansas. I also recognize that continuing my valued relationships with my friends from the seminary community will take intention. We’ll have to work on connecting and remaining in one another’s lives. But that isn’t because of pandemic. It’s because our time at seminary is coming to an end. Not the way we expected or would have liked, but in the natural order, nonetheless.
It’s time for us to move on to doing what General Theological Seminary has prepared us to do; to lead the church to a new beginning and to guide the church to a reimagining in the new reality of today.
Jennifer Allen
Wisdom Year Resident
THIS SUNDAY, MAY 10
(To access each program on Zoom, click the link in the title.)
10:00 AM - Integrity in Crisis: A Bible Study on Job
Join the Vicar for a series of classes on the Book of Job and learn how this timeless text can address our suffering in this difficult time.
10:00 AM - Digital Sunday School Materials Emailed
11:00 AM - Congregation Watch Party for Cathedral Worship Service
Watch the Cathedral worship service on Zoom with other members of the Congregation.
You can also watch the Cathedral Worship Service
On Facebook: http://facebook.com/StJohnDivineNYC
On the Cathedral website: http://www.stjohndivine.org
12:00 PM - Digital Coffee Half-Hour
This week the digital coffee "Half-Hour" is hosted by members of the Vestry.
12:30 PM - Adult Formation Class on the Daily Office
Sub Dean Malloy continues his class on the history, theology, and practice of the Daily Office.
***There is ONE LINK for all Congregation programs on zoom, which you can access by clicking here
WEEKLY CATHEDRAL CONGREGATION PROGRAMS
(To access each program on Zoom, click the link in the title.)
Tuesdays | 6:00PM - YESS Bible Study
Wednesdays | 6:30 PM - Congregation Book Group
Wednesdays | 8:30 PM - Congregation Compline
GIVE
Thank you to everyone who was a part of #GivingTuesdayNow! Because of you, we were able to raise $2,400 for the Congregation on this global day of giving and unity. Your generosity is what will allow us to continue the ministry of our Cathedral Congregation. We could not be more grateful.
If you missed #GivingTuesdayNow, it is not too late to get involved! Here is the link to give.
Whether you or someone you care about has benefited from the mission of the Congregation, we’d love to hear why you give. Drop us a line at vestry@saintsaviour.org.
SERVE
Join members of the Congregation in participating in the Poor People's Campaign Digital March on Washington on June 20. The Campaign is led by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who gave an electrifying sermon at the Cathedral last May, calling for a "Moral Pentecost." The Digital March on Washington will highlight the deep structural inequities in our society, which is making the effects of the global pandemic fall disproportionately on working class communities of color.
Register for the March here.
NEWS FROM THE CATHEDRAL
Listen to past sermons on the Cathedral’s podcast, Voices from the Cathedral. Every week after Sunday's service, sermons will be posted so you can tune in from the comfort of your living room, on a physically distanced walk, or wherever you find yourself.
Add your voice to this year’s Pentecost liturgy, when members of the Congregation read the Acts of the Apostles in many languages. If you speak another language and are willing to contribute by recording a short video for consideration, please email liturgy@stjohndivine.org by next Friday, May 15 and let Peter Ennis know what language you speak.
Marsha and Tim
How many of us are thinking these days about ancestors throughout the world who have lived through various horrible plagues? Did any of us think that we in the 21st century would experience this ourselves? Our junior warden Tim Dwyer who is an historian, writes about how people experienced plagues in the 17th century and wonders if there are lessons to be learned.
Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe's account of London’s “Great Plague” of 1665-1666, A Journal of the Plague Year, includes many passages that feel strikingly familiar to us almost four centuries later. It was ordered that people in hard-hit areas should isolate in their homes, coffee houses and ale-houses be closed, and “all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited.” Essential merchants even devised an innovative form of contactless payment: "The butcher would not touch the money, but had it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyers carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might make no change." And there was the terror of what we today refer to as asymptomatic transmission: "One man, who may have really received the infection, and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and neither the person giving the infection nor the persons receiving it know anything of it."
And it seems that no plague has ever arrived without proclamations that it was being visited upon society as message of divine judgment. During the London pandemic of 1603, Pastor Henoch Clapham wrote: “Famine, sword and pestilence, are a trinitie of punishments prepared of the Lord, for consuming a people that have sinned against him.” He argued that since plague was not transmitted through any natural means but came instead through God’s divine providence, plague quarantine orders should be ignored. Sound familiar? The local authorities of the time had the good sense to lock him up.
Happily, our theology has evolved a bit over the last four centuries even if our political discourse is still lagging a century or two behind. While we reject the idea of Corona as an intentional act of an angry God, we can still ask ourselves if the things we have done -- or left undone -- have made it worse. Can we learn something from this terrible experience and make our world “more right” after this crisis has passed?
Now more than ever before, we see the true costs of our failure to address socio-economic inequality and the inadequacy of our healthcare, eldercare, and education systems. We see how perilously close to the financial abyss so many of our young people live in the “gig economy,” whether they are working at restaurants, theaters, or some start-up company. We see the costs of employees without paid sick leave, working parents without childcare, the unemployed without health insurance, and undocumented persons without recourse to public assistance. We see how truly inter-dependent we all are, and just how much we rely on our neighbors, our places of worship, our first-responders, and the workers stocking the shelves and cleaning the subways.
One day, hopefully soon, we will move to a less-isolated “new normal.” With such abundant evidence of injustice and neglect confronting us every day, God forgive us indeed if we fail to learn from this event and act accordingly.
Amen!
Blessings from Tim and Marsha