Mass in the Time of Quarantine

I arrived at mass a few minutes late. I hadn’t realized I would go at all until Father Anthony’s face, luminously pale against the sanctuary’s blood-red drapes, popped up on my Facebook page. One-click, and I heard the full-throated baritone of our choir director and pianist, Eddie. I settled in. This would be my first time attending mass in the time of quarantine. I was at St. Agatha’s. The force of the familiar held me.

In addition to Fr. Anthony and Eddie, two parishioners joined in the mass. All together participating in the day’s readings, their several voices met in the shared telling of a tale from long ago of death and a dream, betrayal and regret, an earthquake and an empty tomb. Throughout, blue “thumbs up” and red “heart” emojis (and a single tear-dropped face, the source of the sorrow ours to guess) bubbled up, hovering on the right side of the screen as if scaling the sanctuary wall then, puff!, disappeared—a rush of affective response that ebbed and flowed throughout mass. Comment boxes in a continuous stream populated my page like so many whispering children in the pew before, behind, alongside, a modern-day gloss, a marginal notation that pulls at the center of my attention. I watch Fr. Anthony, and I listen while reading the moving sidebar and jotting down observations, joining a gallery of semi-detached spectators, I suppose, mindful that my while-at-mass readings and scribblings might be construed not merely as breaches of ecclesial etiquette but fractures in community. But what if they are instead (or as well) private acts of devotion offered in communion with the whole, I wondered as I doodled? The whole constituted in this context something like two hundred parishioners, although the number—which after darting my eyes around the screen several times I figured how to read (I am not Facebook savvy)—went up and down, some of the congregants “arriving” only toward the end of mass. Part of the point I wish to make is precisely that I noticed this, the fluctuating numbers, something like the sometimes-welcome distraction during mass (when the priest drones on or when I’m all-over achy from the too-hardness of the pew) of the goings-in and –out of the building on West Adams Boulevard from the days before the pandemic. But something else is going on, for it is Palm Sunday, and in Los Angeles, we have been sheltering at home for several weeks already. I notice because my secluded state has primed me to mark others’ presence, however ephemeral, and to consider absence and departure with new urgency, as I know it has done for so many of us.

My husband walks by on the way to a morning coffee. An old wooden school chair, a hot pink reminder of my daughter’s years-ago painting spree, stares at me from the garden through sliding glass doors, a refugee from a newly organized garage. (Like many households, quarantine has infected ours with a cleaning and cleaning-out frenzy, of which my sister-in-law is the chief victim.) Flowers beckon with thoughts of a bouquet I’ll make today. Plucked poppies—yellow, orange, red—collapse quickly; I’ll have better luck with the staying power of purple and orange bougainvillea, pink geraniums, and periwinkle plumbago, among the most glorious of Southern California’s weeds and which I have cultivated, a rambunctious explosion.

While attuned to my own a sense of deprivation as exiled-in-isolation from my remembered experience of mass, I simultaneously find a sense of community in this virtual event, a satisfaction largely lodged, I think, exactly in the desire for what I lack: physical proximity, the touch and smell of the packed side-by-side sensual experience that is St. Agatha’s, pews bursting with women and men dressed in their own kaleidoscope of colors. Mine is a jaunty parish, nothing somber or restrained about it, loud and hopeful and unafraid of lamentation, those who lead us in song sometimes pausing to...