Leaving Anatevka - What to take?

    There is a great scene in Fiddler on the Roof in which the young tailor Motel Kamzoil - who marries Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel - celebrates the ‘new arrival’ of a sewing machine. The people of the village gather around and congratulate the couple as though they had just given birth. Times are changing and this machine will be very important to them. Coincidentally, there is a new current of independent thinking among the youth, and Tevye the father fears that this will destroy their traditions, their way of life. To add a further huge complication, the Jews of the area are under attack from the Russians who are doing their best to take away their livelihood and force the Jews to find new ways to survive. For many, this involves leaving the area. The sewing machine will become important in the transition. It itself is not the transition, but it surely marks it. The couple will never forget the times in which they received that sewing machine.

    Peggy and I were excited like Motel and Tzeitel when our new baby arrived: a new gym style treadmill. The sewing machine image readily came to my mind. And as I thought about it over the next few days, it occurred to me that the image fits more closely than I had imagined at first.

    The Coronavirus has attacked our way of life. It has changed our ability to freely go places, it has robbed many of their income. Like Tevye and his family, we lost even our freedom to worship in the way to which we had been accustomed.

    For the two of us, the ability to move around in the community had included daily visits to the gym, high priority given our health histories. Those visits ceased, and we were left with walking in the community. Perfectly ok, but the weather has a lot to say about how and when you are going to do that! In particular, snow and bitter cold will be here in no time. Anticipating that, we made a big decision to transition to a new routine that would protect us in two ways: against exposure to the enemy virus in a gym, and against the weather elements that stop us from participating at all. The new routine is the treadmill in the basement.

    By itself, this is not at all noteworthy. But it is a bit like Motel’s sewing machine. It occurs as part of a transition to a new era. It does not make the transition, but it does mark it. As with many events in our lives this year, we will never forget when this took place.

    What was life like for those Jewish communities that had to leave everything behind? If you have seen the movie or play, you know that no matter how bad things were ever going to get, what they possessed to give them balance now and forever, was tradition. No-one could take that from them. The challenge, however, was how to incorporate it into the new reality of starting from scratch, and at the same time dealing with the perennial roiling that comes with kids growing up and thinking for themselves.

    Goodness, some of this sounds very familiar. My dad was greatly distressed by the changes brought by Vatican II in the mid 1960's. He kept asking me ‘What were we doing that was so wrong?’ I was so gung ho with Vatican II that I am not sure I gave him a full hearing. But he was upset.

    We are not in a Vatican Council circumstance right now, but we surely have experienced change in liturgies, starting with our ability to attend them. In the course of dealing with the disruption, parishes around the world have learned to stream their liturgies, and to get good at it. The upside of this is participation even if a step removed. The downside is no physical community gathering and no Eucharist. The convenience factor does not at all make up for those two losses. I think there is consensus on that.

    The next evolution - we are in the middle of it - has been the slow reopening of churches for liturgies, with limited seating capacity, strict social distancing rules, and significant limitations on the spoken and sung word by all those present. There is Eucharist, and there is community. And there is greatly slimmed down liturgical celebrations. Where is all that leading us?

    Not too long ago the National Catholic Reporter ran a series in which it asked the question, What next? The Church after Coronavirus.

    To my surprise, the authors and the people interviewed focused almost not at all on the details of the liturgies, as I might have expected they would. They focused instead on the nature of the communities, and what our gatherings are even supposed to be for. Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University worried that with our ability to choose the community we want to tune into online, we may be inclined to seek out groups with whom we resonate, rather than contributing to the local community of which we are a part. 

    Jesuit Fr. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator who is president of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar, cautions against too much insularity wherein we look inward and end up trapped in bureaucratic and clericalist structures as before. This is an opportunity he argues, for us to look outward to those we have not included. After all, that is central to the teachings of Jesus. In saying this, he is anchoring all our changes in the biggest tradition there is - the Good News of the Gospel.

    Julie Hanlon Rubio is professor at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. She marvels at the ability to form or join whatever community one wishes, through Zoom. She adds: “Yet I also strongly believe in the idea of a local parish, where you show up to worship with people who aren't like you, but to whom you are connected as members of the Body of Christ. I'm grateful for Sunday mornings that feel like opportunity instead of struggle. But I'm worried about what will be lost when we choose the church we prefer over the one down the street.”   Again, she is pointing at the heart of the Gospel.

    I think that what is coming through here is that there are a lot of changes that may amount to transitions. Those transitions may well include changes within the liturgy. But that is not the emphasis these writers are discerning. Rather, there is a shared excitement that maybe, just maybe, the Church will return to its roots in the social/ redemptive mission of Jesus Christ, which is to bring all people together in love - no-one left out. In the words of Fr.Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator: “I am minded to dream of a post-coronavirus church with doors open to a new Pentecost that blows social distances away and frees consciences of bureaucratic, clericalist and hierarchical structures and certainties in which we were schooled to place our trust. I dream of a church receptive to new ways of practising solidarity and compassion in response to Jesus' commission to be women and men for others.”

    Isn’t this interesting. Doesn’t it hit you that if we emerge from all this with our eyes open and our minds attentive to who we are and to whom we belong, the liturgies will line up just fine? Changed or not.

    We are leaving Anatevka. Dangers of various kinds have forced that upon us. It turns out that difficult as this may be, and as unsettling as the experience has been, this is also a great opportunity. I am not sure what our sewing machine would be as we make our transition. But if we listen to voices such as I just referred to, we would have found our balance in the middle of change. Tevye said it well. Change all around us, anchored by a precious possession. Tradition.