Gathering and singing along with members of her community, Katherine Douglass understands more deeply that congregations are uniquely positioned to do the work of communal reconstruction.
In the long, lonely aftermath of the pandemic, I have been thinking about social healing and what might be needed to rebuild community relationships. Barbie helped us go back to the movies en masse, and sports stadiums have welcomed fans of both Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. My kids have playdates again, although all the kids I know prefer for the friend to come to their house. And Shakespeare in the Park was fully revived this past summer on the Green Stages around Seattle. Yet, as my kids point out, I still cry at church. My lament is not yet over for the destruction caused by years of social distancing.
I see the communal rubble in stark relief. I see the anxiety among kids in my neighborhood and the way this is manifested in various behavioral challenges and eating disorders. I am keenly aware of the learning that was lost while my husband and I taught on computers upstairs and our kids mastered the art of watching YouTube in the basement. Most of the marriages I am close to are struggling with challenges that were amplified by the pandemic and continue to be exacerbated by working from home. My students are harder to catch when they begin to fail and the embodied routines at my college have changed in subtle, but significant, ways.
I see the communal rubble in stark relief.
A few weeks ago, I walked to a small neighborhood arts venue and sang along with 250 of my neighbors at the sold-out event called “Pub Choir.” It was not in a pub, and we were not in a choir, but all in attendance now feel famous because the performers recorded it and put it on the internet. Even months later, I am still bubbling from the collective effervescence of learning a three-part harmony version of “The Best,” famously covered by Tina Turner. Australian choral director Astrid Jorgenson set the stage by telling us to put our phones away. They would be filming us. We were the show. She had us belt out the chorus from “What’s Up,” by 4 Non-Blondes to figure out which voice part to stand with. Before she told us what song we would be singing and recording that night, Astrid said, “You might not know this song. You might not even like this song. But tonight, it’s not about your preferences. This is about us, singing together.”
Astrid taught everyone their lines with a glorious low-budget PowerPoint presentation. We were instructed to follow our color-coded lines that were accompanied by memes to remind us of the style we were going for. There was a little girl tossing her hair like a rock star, April Ludgate from “Parks and Rec” shimmying at her office desk, chickens who kept their heads still while their bodies bounced around, and a guy sliding on an icy sidewalk for a “slippery” part. Astrid would sing the line for us, then have us sing it back to her.
It was a holy call and response with subtle correctives like, “I see you moving a lot and working hard. I like your version, but I am wondering if you might want to try my version?” When she heard that a few of us “got it,” she winked at us saying, “I see you elementary school music teachers out there! Fabulous! Now squeeze the hand of someone near you and whisper to them, ‘We’ve got this’ and make sure they follow you for the slippery part.”
Despite my church’s amazing response to the COVID pandemic and my own leadership in online church services, I really hated it. I hated it because it amplified the reality that we were isolated from each other. I didn’t hate what was happening online, I hated that I felt alone. The social ties I had to people, the way we used to sing together, shake hands with strangers when we passed the peace, and hold hands when we prayed — gone. I missed listening to people sigh, cough, laugh, or cry when they offered up a prayer aloud. I missed the squirrelly kids in the pews who asked their parents questions during the moments of silence during the service. All of this was lost.
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