From the Editor: The virus and the chalice

Today’s lesson comes from the Book of Buckaroos: We’ve got heartaches by the number, and troubles by the score.
None of us has seen anything like the governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic, except maybe for the rationing and restrictions put in place during World War II.
Festivals are canceled, bars and casinos are closed, no sit-down dining at restaurants, no school for the kids and no gatherings of more than 250 people.
And that’s just in Louisiana. San Francisco, which has a history of dealing with public health emergencies, is in effect ordering people to stay in their homes.
By international standards, we’re practically restriction-free. Silvia Bertolazzi, a Facebook friend who owned a gelato shop in Lafayette before moving back to her native Italy, recently posted a picture of the government permit she needed to leave her house for a trip to a pharmacy.
The economic dislocations are going to be doozies. The economists who had been predicting a recession are now saying, "Dude. It’s here." And St Mary wasn’t exactly rolling in dough before.
Yet nothing has struck home quite as forcefully as the effect on worship services.
Services for all faiths have been affected by the limit on crowd sizes, and public Masses have been canceled by Catholic bishops. Even memorial Masses will have to wait.
Even before the latest round of restrictions, the bishops had issued cautions about communion, suggesting that the bread should not be placed directly on the tongue of worshippers and maybe wine from a common cup wasn’t a good idea.
That, at least, we’d seen before.
I can remember communion at the Lutheran church my family attended when I was a kid in Missouri in the ’60s and ’70s. We all sipped wine from a chalice, certainly that most valuable thing I’d ever seen that didn’t have a mortgage attached to it, during a service centered on the Lord’s supper.
In the Lutheran liturgy then, communion was followed by a song called the Nunc Dimittis, based on Simeon’s prayer of thanks for living long enough to see the baby Jesus. It’s a beautiful song, and it fit the moment.
The service was one of those things that even the smallest, poorest church can do to make us feel close to God, like the raising of the host in a Catholic service or the soft humming of “Just As I Am” during an old-fashioned Baptist altar call.
In the classic American male Protestant pattern, I stopped going to church as a teen and didn’t really go back until it was time to get married. My wife nudged me back to church, a Lutheran church but in Lafayette this time, in no small part to see to the religious education of my new stepchildren.
That was in the early 1990s. By then, communion had changed.
Now there were two separate calls to the altar: one for those who wanted to drink from the common cup, and another for those who preferred taking wine from individual plastic cups.
It was all about AIDS.
I always chose the common cup. The little cups seemed more fitting for a supermarket soda sample than for the Eucharist. Besides, if it comes down to a battle between the virus on one hand and Jesus, me and a 12% alcohol solution on the other, I like my odds.
But it’s easy to understand why people chose the individual cups. It’s probably the smart thing to do, just as the new restrictions make sense. One of the lessons we’re supposed to get from church is to take care of one another.
It’s just sad that at this time when we need to care for our neighbors, we’re being pushed apart.
Maybe the best advice comes from Beverly Domengeaux, the St. Mary Council on Aging director. She’s a good two decades into senior citizenship herself, but she is full of energy and seems to be at every public event.
Domengeaux was at Berwick’s March 10 Town Council meeting. She was asked what the town should be doing for seniors.
“Don’t give them a hug,” Domengeaux said. “Just take care of them.”
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.