For everyone who is hoping 2021 is better than 2020, my heart is with you, and I hope you get the relief from distress for which you long. For me personally, I do not hope that 2021 be better than 2020. I pray earnestly that it be different, and that it be far better for all those so horribly displaced by the events of 2020, but I must give thanks, for in truth the year 2020 treated me well. My prayer is that 2021 treat others better, for I cannot fairly complain of how 2020 treated me, neither in comparison to how others fared, nor honestly on its own merits. It was certainly not the year I had planned nor the year I hoped for, and yet it gave me gifts.
I mourn with all those who mourn. So many people died. So many people were and are horribly sick. So many people were alone when they desperately didn't want to be. People lost jobs and entire industries had to shut down. People couldn't celebrate life milestones together, and people couldn't gather with friends. For all these, and with all these, I mourn.
But also I give thanks. The year marked a retreat, in so many senses of the word, into my own home, a mostly peaceful and pleasant place. Yes, I wish I could safely have family and friends into the space, and long for the time when that can happen again, but the imposed opportunity to stay home was in its own way a blessing for me. How often is the act of staying safely in one's home an act of love, service, and civic duty? What a gift that service to friend, neighbor, and country might take the form of doing one's part to refrain from spreading disease in such a relatively pleasant form for me! I pray fervently for those for whom staying home is not safe or not pleasant, but I certainly cannot complain.
I thank 2020 for the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement and efforts to hold police accountable for violence, brutality, and racism. While there is a long, long way to go, I am glad that resistance to institutional violence and oppression had as much of a spotlight as it did this year. I thank 2020 for the millions upon millions of voters who found ways to safely cast their ballots in resistance to the current regime. I am grateful for the many, many people who disrupted their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors from disease. I thank 2020 for all the parts of the world who modeled humane and effective responses to pandemic. I thank 2020 for putting a spotlight on the consequences of our inequality, our lack of public health care and sick leave, and our reliance on ever-expanding markets, and pray that we may learn from those lessons to build a more humane society going forward.
The year marked profound growth in my life of prayer. Despite being connected only by voice and sometimes camera image, I prayed both the Office and the Mass with others far more this year than ever before in my life, and for that I give great thanks. Yes, I despise the spatial separation the pandemic demanded, but my experiences this year of the Mass and Office celebrated in dispersed community has been profound in helping me clarify my longing to be in a community that can celebrate them physically together throughout the weeks and years. And the gatherings assisted by remote communication technology were profoundly meaningful in their own ways, even as they pointed painfully to the limits of technologically mediated gatherings. The year for me was a time of profound spiritual growth, and a time to explore the boundaries of possibility when it comes to gathering and praying in community when the act of physical gathering endangers not only the ones gathering but everyone else with whom they come in contact. The year 2020 gave me a taste, imperfect to be sure, but incredibly clarifying, of not just the longing but the joy of imperfectly participating in something resembling communal celebration of the Daily Office and conventual mass. I am profoundly thankful for these experiences that the year’s limitations actually made possible and necessary.
Professionally, 2020 also treated me well, certainly compared to people whose jobs became dangerous or impossible, but also in absolute terms. Both teaching and leading a parish had to be thoroughly reinvented in the face of the pandemic. This was challenging, and required developing new skills and techniques, but the professional development in both contexts taught me things that I believe will make me much more effective in both settings once life returns to more face-to-face contact. Additionally, the disruption brought about by the pandemic was more acute but perhaps less thorough than the disruption necessarily coming to both parish ministry and higher eduction if either field has a hope of being sustainable going into the future. As much as we had to reinvent things in 2020, it was in some ways practice for some of the more thorough institutional and methodological reinvention both higher education and the dying institution known as the parish will need to undertake to be able to play their needed role in a future in which they will be unable to continue in their current shapes. Being involved in a temporary emergency reinvention of each was exciting, and taught me a lot about the challenges and joys of reinvention, and the urgency of preserving the parish and the academy in some form even if their current structure seems utterly unsustainable. The jobs I did took many many many more hours than usual to be able to perform them at a quality far below the standards to which I am accustomed, but I was able to continue to do both jobs and to expand my skill set in each dramatically in the process.
The hardest part of 2020 for me was the limitations on gathering with family and friends. This I truly mourn. Videoconferencing cannot hug. Group conference calls remove the one-on-one side conversations that are my joy in gatherings. One-on-one phone calls could be good for conversation, if only good quality connections were a thing. I remember a time when Sprint’s advertisements showed a pin dropping, advertising that their call quality was so good you could hear a pin drop. I can now only dream of phone connections that do not make a person sound like a Martian robot. Neither landlines nor cell phones nor internet calling has given me an acceptable sound quality, and the frustrations of trying to communicate thusly make me want to withdraw into my hermitage and visit with family and friends again when in-person visits are again safe. Most days solitude seems far preferable to social Zoom gatherings (great for tasks, miserable for socializing – but unstructured socializing is awkward for me to begin with, and Zoom compounds that) or garbled phone calls.
I hope 2021 is a very different year than 2020, but I give thanks for the blessings that 2020 shared with me.
