Leaning into Love
March 10, 2022
We're all struggling with how to worship after Omicron. What's the right balance of precaution that will mean caring for one another and caring for our community? How scared should we be? How bold should we be? We thought we had a plan, and the Omicron sneaker-wave knocked us onto the rocks. Can we ever trust a plan again?
Take a deep breath.
Take another.
We've got this.
Remember, we have a lot more tools than we did two years ago. We have a lot more information than we did two months ago. We also have our values, and our call to love, which has not changed. If we lead with the questions, "What does it mean to love our neighbor in the age of COVID?" and "What does it mean to love one another in the age of COVID?" I know we'll find a good path forward.
Loving Our Neighbor
The Delta and Omicron waves made it absolutely certain that the pandemic is only a pandemic for adults who are unvaccinated. In both waves, our hospitals were filled to capacity, almost entirely with adults who had not been vaccinated.
For those of us who are healthy and have access to vaccines, the best way we can love our neighbors who work in healthcare is to get vaccinated, so they don't have to care for us. The best way we can love our neighbors who need hospital beds is to get vaccinated, so we don't take a bed from them. The best way we can love our neighbors who can't get vaccinated is to get vaccinated, so we reduce the risk of giving them a potentially dangerous disease. Please get vaccinated, and please treat this as a moral matter, because I'm convinced it is.
In the last two waves we also learned that the most-important factor in our community is hospital capacity. When the pandemic wave was crashing, and hospitals were full, it was essential that everyone do anything we could to flatten the curve of the wave and reduce hospital admissions. As we prepare for future waves, this also helps us know how to better love our neighbors.
The CDC has recommended that we key our responses to community transmission to the capacity of ICU beds in our local hospitals, not to positive test rates. An example of this is the CPC Board's decision that three weeks before any in-person gathering we will look at statistics for ICU beds in the state in which that meeting is happening. If ICU beds in the state are 85% full (especially if the trajectory is not falling), we will cancel the in-person meeting. There are lots of places to find hospital-capacity data for counties, but the CPC Board has chosen to use CovidActNow.
As we lurch from the pandemic phase to the endemic phase of our relationship with the novel coronavirus, you will naturally begin to adopt behaviors that are more-risky (singing with masks, worshipping unmasked, having potlucks). That's good and proper, especially in churches that are highly vaccinated. As I've said before, our highly-vaccinated churches can be test communities for what the world could look like in the endemic stage.
However, you will also need to watch for waves. To do this, I recommend you follow the CDC advice and look at ICU beds as an indicator that a wave is coming. When you see a wave coming, take precautions to help flatten the curve, and not overwhelm your local hospitals.This is what resilience looks like when you live close to a place where waves crash. You don't stop walking on the beach, you just learn to pay attention. This is what it looks like to love our neighbors in the age of COVID.
Loving One Another
This is where I can't give you a recommendation that works for all of our churches. As we experiment with what life and church looks like in endemic communities, you will necessarily need to find what works for your local church. The right worship practices depend entirely on your members, your comfort levels, your risk factors.
However, I will offer a piece of advice from my time working as an AIDS peer-educator: Get more comfortable with talking to one another.
As we live with communicable diseases, it's important that we normalize talking about our comfort levels and our risk factors. I can't know what you need unless you tell me. And I may not tell you what I need unless you ask. I also have a duty to tell you information that puts you at risk, (for example, if I recently traveled to St. Louis but I still want to go to coffee with you, then I need to tell you that so you can make an informed decision).
At my home church, Waverly Heights UCC, we've begun wearing color-coded beads that cue people to our comfort level around contact. Red means, "Please don't touch me or come within my six-foot bubble." Yellow means, "You can enter my six-foot bubble, but please don't touch me." Green means, "You can ask if I want a hug." The first time I went to church after I had COVID, I was feeling very vulnerable and contagious. Even though I knew intellectually that I was well-past my quarantine date, I still wanted to walk around shouting, "Unclean! Unclean!" I don't know if I would have gone to church that first Sunday, if I hadn't known I could put on some red beads and people would respect my need for space.
I'm not saying you should adopt a bead system. I'm saying you should talk to one another and figure out what will work for your community. Maybe you have some families with very young children who need everyone to mask so they can feel safe bringing their children to church. Maybe you have folks whose depression is severely exacerbated by continued isolation, and who must have some kind of in-person coffee hour, no matter the risk.
Whatever the makeup of your community, you must communicate your needs and wants and risk factors. Loving one another means trying to accommodate one another's needs, and sometimes giving up our wants, and it means allowing informed consent when you're putting someone at risk. That's how we love one another in the age of COVID.
Keep Practicing
None of this is easy. Learning to watch for waves often begins with hyper-vigilance, but we eventually learn to judge the tides, currents, and weather. We'll do the same with the COVID waves. Leaning into conversations about our needs and wants and risk factors often feels vulnerable and awkward at first, but I can tell you from experience that it gets easier with practice.
You will make mistakes. That's part of living in novel times with a novel coronavirus. However, if you lean into love, I know you'll continue to learn and grow and move in the right direction.
And you'll continue to be the church for this time and this place.
Thank you, as always, for that.
Blessings,
Tyler
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