Where these practices became the default of bishops, the potential failure of the synodal process is high because these practices were made possible by sidelining the laity. What is the potential for bishops to listen to the laity when they have excluded them from their liturgical participation?

Some will argue that liturgy is not the centre of the Church's life or that bishops used online formats out of compassion and care in a pandemic. Nevertheless, if the Church leaders can exclude the laity liturgically, what's the point of including them in another ecclesial conversation?

My point is this: where the liturgical practice is not seen as ecclesial, it is not seen.

The Church is the kyriakon (belonging to the Lord) ekklesia (assembly) of Christ. The liturgy celebrates and makes this manifest. Liturgy, worship, thanksgiving—whatever word you wish to use—stands at the centre of the Church's being and purpose. Without the liturgy, the Church is just another club or social welfare system.

Not just about in liturgical style

Often, liturgical divisions are treated as differences in style when one person prefers Bach to Led Zeppelin. At this shallow level, arguments of style and preference dominate, but these are only a starting point.

Liturgy, at its deepest level, articulates humanity's primary and perennial quest: "Who is God, who am I, and is my life eternal?" This quest is taken up sacramentally and expressed liturgically.

How individuals and groups perform liturgical rituals is instructive of much more than just a style preference.

Liturgical rituals articulate an individual's or a group's understanding and beliefs of the relationships between God and the Church, the priesthood, sacramental living and ecclesial authority. Ritual enactment illustrates a much deeper, formative religious culture of belief.

This culture is formed, informed and reformed through ecclesial life, sacramental mediation and theological thinking.

During the liturgical lockdown of 2020-2021, the increased use of online Masses was made possible for four main reasons -

• the performative nature of the Mass's ritual structure,
• the functional nature of priesthood,
• the presumption that the function of the Mass is essentially clerical, and
• that the presence of the laity at liturgy is not constitutive.

While many lay recipients of online Mass reported that they found the experience "comforting," many also reported that it was too priest-centric and ultimately dissatisfying. By contrast, many priests saw the increased online numbers as validation of their ministry.

The critical problem of the absence of the laity was never fully addressed. The success of online Masses can only be praised by avoiding questions of authentic liturgical presence as a physical presence.

Why would any layperson entertain a dialogue about Church life after being systematically excluded by their God-given leaders from their rightful participation in their own liturgical life?

Synodal, liturgical practice

An authentic approach to the synodal process requires that we review the liturgical responses during the lockdown.

One's liturgical practice is essentially ecclesiological. Where the liturgy (Mass) is considered a ritualised, institutional form that functions independently of all other Church business—we go to Mass, we don't live Mass—synodality has already failed because the essential link between the Church's mission and action has been discounted.

The institutional structures and doctrines (God, priesthood, baptism, ministry and ecclesial authority) that Johann Adam Moehler (1796-1838) - in Die Einheit in der Kirche called Gemeinschaft and Romano Guardini in Vom Sinn der Kirche - described as essential to spiritual or mystical communion in Christ, find their authentic expression in liturgical practice.

Liturgical practice is ecclesiology in action.

Liturgical ecclesiology

A robust liturgical ecclesiology contributes to the development of synodal ecclesiology through the examination of actual liturgical practice and culture. It offers a window into the strong, often submerged cultures of belief, dogma and identity that drive individual and group practice because it requires participants to consider their practice first.

For example, when a person agrees that authentic liturgical practice belongs primarily to the priest/bishop by ordination, and not to the laity by baptism, there is little need to discuss inclusive governance. The liturgical default setting has already defined the ecclesial outlook.

Equally, a person who approaches liturgical practice as transformative will look for transformation through the synodal process. They will probably say that worship is predicated on baptism and not see liturgy as essentially performative or functional.

If the synodal process is not transformative, this person will turn away, disappointed.

Lockdown and Synod

Covid's liturgical lockdown practices are not incidental to the synodal process and vision, neither were they the product of Covid. The lockdown practices already existed deep in the psyche of the Church because they are the default setting of a much deeper ecclesial culture.

The online Mass, with its passive, observer layperson and its performative, functional priest, is the clearest example of the synodal process's challenge.

If we cannot hear one another at worship, what is the point of engaging with each other at the level of governance? Will a change in governance change our approach to liturgy, or must our liturgy change first?

Suppose your participation in a process is not a constitutive element of your organisation's practice. Would you participate based on this presumption?

Liturgical practice reveals the ecclesial culture that synodality needs to address but probably will not.

Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. "Liturgical Lockdown: A New Zealand Perspective" is available from Amazon.com

• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with the author's permission.

The country is in lockdown to manage the delta outbreak, and all the worshippers at Sri Venkateswara, a Hindu temple in Wainuiomata, Lower Hutt, are at home.

Online, though, the bells are ringing.

A priest chants prayers on the Facebook livestream, and for a moment, the screen doesn't seem to matter: this is just another day of worship.

"When you are seeing the holy shrine via a digital channel, it's a different experience," says BMK Lakshminarayanan, the chair of the temple, who oversees the temple activities and performs ceremonies. But "it can still feel like you're there".

I do not share his faith, but as I watch the video, I can nearly smell the ghee and incense, familiar to me from a childhood visiting temples in India.

A click away, though, is the rest of my Facebook feed: promoted MasterClasses, people making bread, and American Chopper memes. Is there any space for the sacred among the endless scroll of the mundane?

It's not just Hinduism.

More than half of New Zealanders say they are religious, and in lockdown, these millions try to replace their physical communities of faith with online equivalents. Around Aotearoa, faith leaders are learning to use laptops, not altars;

WhatsApp, not home visits.

Circumstances of necessity like the pandemic encourage technological uptake, but what challenges does online worship pose? And will it last?

Online worship requires faith leaders to work on a practical level: microphones, links, cameras.

Often, the results are unsatisfactory.

"Some churches are better at it than others, but unless they were good at it already, digital churches will have low production values," says Michael Toy, a PhD student studying digital religious expressions at Victoria University of Wellington.

This is particularly true of Zoom services.

Even within the uses, it was designed for - business meetings where one person speaks at a time - it can easily glitch.

The problems multiply when elements of worship, such as singing, praying out loud, and sharing different screens are added: people freeze in the middle of songs, the wrong person gets pinned to the main screen, and there's an explosion of noise as people try to greet each other.

Dave Moskowitz is a shamash at Temple Sinai, a progressive Jewish congregation in Wellington.

In-person, a shamash (the Hebrew word for a synagogue attendant) will open the temple, arrange chairs, and organise music. When the congregation meets on Zoom, he becomes an "e-shamash", organising a link to the meeting, and welcoming people as they arrive on screen.

The platform can be limiting. "Our members are older and not as technically literate," Moskowitz says.

"Some have trouble operating Zoom, or staying muted."

Technical knowledge is essential for online services at the Wellington Anglican Diocese, where assistant bishop Ellie Sanderson preaches on YouTube each week; off-screen, someone with a soundboard and lots of monitors can flick between her, musicians, and people giving announcements.

"We are really thankful that we had people with the technical know-how to create digital services for us," she says.

The practical facilitation of online worship has positive sides.

Digital services can be vital for people who cannot come to physical services - those who live far from their places of worship, and those who are ill or have disabilities.

"Would-be worshippers can't always be present in person, for varied reasons, and there is greater recognition of the ways technology can helpfully connect people in these circumstances," says Geoff Troughton, assistant professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, who studies contemporary religion in Aotearoa.

"This will drive ongoing innovations."

Sanderson, the Anglican bishop, knows this first hand: last year, after surgery on her neck, she couldn't leave the house for weeks. But she still had Zoom church.

"My vehicle for worship was the online service," she says, "and I really felt that God broke my heart in fresh ways, encouraged me, spoke to my grief."

Online prayer and teachings has also meant faith communities can expand their reach, including people who would never come to in-person gatherings on their own.

"It might help for people who are new to our religion," says Tahir Nawaz, a Muslim chaplain involved with mosques across Wellington.

"They used to hesitate to come and ask questions… but now there's an entry to online [interactions]. It definitely will help bring us together."

Despite the tedium of muting microphones or the hilarious irreverence of accidental Zoom filters, those with a faith find that digital worlds can be a place of genuine spiritual encounter.

Attesting to this is Elisa Choi, who organises "Rally" meetings with the Rice movement, an evangelical organisation focused on young Asians.

She was praying with a friend before a Rally gathering, with people across Aotearoa linked via Zoom.

A pastor started praying for someone with a bad ankle, asking God for healing.

The prayer ended, and Choi's friend jumped up; the pain in her ankle, which had been sprained for weeks, was gone, says Choi.

According to Choi, it's not a one-off.

"There's so many more stories and testimonies of people who have mental health prayed over [online], finding healing and release."

That online prayer can be answered is encouraging, because creating digital space that is both sacred and communal is a difficult task.

For a start, there's the well-documented phenomenon of screen fatigue, meaning online faith content can simply be tiring.

Many religious groups choose not to offer anything at all and encourage their communities to spend time in individual prayer and worship instead.

Digital services may be poorly attended.

There's also the problem of focus.

"What digital life does well is distract us," says Toy, the PhD student in Wellington.

"In a physical space with no screens around it's easier to direct your attention to God or the sacred. If your phone is on the table, part of your brain is having to work to ignore it."

I'm interviewing Toy in a sterile study room at the university, my laptop on the table and my phone recording. I try to disregard the devices, and pay even more attention.

There are also potential ethical snags: in choosing to use giant digital platforms to offer worship, religious leaders expose their congregants to the extractive practices of offshore corporations.

Google and Facebook are international companies that offer social functionality as a way to gather data to sell to advertisers; partaking in a worship service using their platforms creates privacy implications that aren't at issue when attending a local place of worship.

On these websites, the intimacy of religious expression is subject to the same profiteering as tagging a friend in a giveaway or liking a video.

But more fundamentally, online worship raises thorny theological questions about what makes rituals real and meaningful.

"Slick performances and high production values only carry so far, and it is hard to reproduce the communal feel and emotional energy of ‘main show' event religion online," says Troughton, the religious studies professor.

"Rituals are about affect, emotion, and experience as much as they are about ideas. Most are embedded in community and community relationships, and simply don't translate in a satisfying way online." Continue reading

One homeless man, interviewed in his temporary motel accommodation, gratefully acknowledged the help, but worried it would be even harder to resume life "outside".

A Northland child whose family had been rehoused from leaking campervans to ones not needed for locked-down holidaymakers exclaimed it was "like being on holiday!"

Does experiencing the basic comforts the rest of us take for granted have to be only a temporary respite for those less fortunate?

Can we look away as fellow humans shiver and suffer on pavements, or in rusty cars or leaky buildings (and let's not disgrace ourselves further by calling these "homes")?

Does life "outside" lockdown have to be the same as before?

Will the creative families whose private lockdown sporting events were featured on the news in lieu of "live sport" resume passively watching individual screens in parallel?

During lockdown, the technology that isolated us became a priceless connector to the "outside" for many.

However, families and especially children without devices and internet access at home could not access education, vital community services or communicate with wider whanau.

The Government proactively ordered devices for affected children and their families.

However, even if these devices had all arrived in time (which they did not), the inequities caused by lack of power, no or insufficient internet bandwidth, lack of printers and scanners are not resolved by providing a single device that multiple family members must share.

Not only that, children and their family members without a history of working with personal devices would certainly lack the critical knowledge needed to gain the maximum benefit from those devices.

Some changes will happen regardless.

Those with lost or reduced incomes cannot resume social and retail therapy.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to have survived lockdown economically may be taking sobering looks at our finances, and wondering if the economies we made in lockdown could be extended.

For example, being in lockdown dampened our literal and figurative need to keep up appearances - if our hair was greyer and shaggier, or our shabby mailbox not replaced, the few who saw us or it, understood.

Perhaps others could be more accepting if we went to the barber or frequented our expensive salon less often.

Lockdown had ended, but the digital acceleration it forced upon us will continue to change the way we live and work. Continue reading

But they are asking the government to just let them know about any perceived weaknesses in the practice of religion so that they can fix them.

The president of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops' Conference, Bishop Patrick Dunn says he appreciates the prime minister's belief that New Zealand is still at quite a vulnerable stage.

"We all understood the reasons, and we knew that the Government was trying to keep us safe, and we were all trying to support the move to avoid the spread of this pretty deadly virus," Dunn said in a Newsroom report.

But Dunn challenged the prime minister's presumption that people at religious gatherings, whether it's mosques or temples or churches, would automatically be breaking that safe distance rule.

New Zealand Muslim Association president Ikhlaq Kashkari says Kashkari says New Zealand's Muslim community was fully accepting of the lockdown, noting that "human life takes priority over us being able to pray in the mosque".

However, Kashkari says the 10 person limit on religious gatherings came as a shock because he had carefully outlined his health and safety plans to the Government.

They included worshippers bringing their own prayer mat, CCTV, and an online booking system to keep numbers under 100.

"Then you take something like a restaurant or even a game of rugby where people have contact and that's allowed and we're not allowed," he said.

Dunn and Kashkari agree that New Zealand's gains should not be put at risk; their question is whether allowing religious services to resume, with suitable physical distancing and other public health measures, would do so.

If there are any weaknesses in our processes then let them know and they can fix them Kashkari says.

Source

• newsroom.co.nz
• newshub.co.nz
• Image: focustaiwan.tw

Under the current law, up to 10 people are permitted to make up the church service.

With such a limitation, it became abundantly clear that the parishes would exclude people.

Eleanor, representing the Foxton and Shannon communities was invited to be one of ten people participating in the Cathedral as the parishes live-streamed Sunday Mass.

On Friday she wrote.

Dear Friends,
I went to Bunnings this afternoon.

There were no queues, people were walking freely in and out of the store, shopping at close proximity to one another and then it dawned on me what Jacinda was doing.

It is not only unpractical but cruel, and now we are presenting this same model to our parishioners.

Imagine a parish of 200 people where only ten can enter the church at a time with restrictions, which means that parishioners must now scramble to get into their own church.

When the Mass was in the presbytery it was beautiful because it looked like a family saying Mass together but if we are going to have a Mass in the Cathedral or church with only a selected few and all the other parishioners excluded, Jacinda would succeed in humiliating us as a worshipping community.

Thank you for asking me to come, but in light of what I experienced today, I have to decline.

God bless us all
Eleanor

Mass from the Cathedral with just ten people was cancelled however continued as it was during lockdown, live-streamed from the confines of the Cathedral Presbytery.

• The Cathedral, Palmerston North, Our Lady of Lourdes and Foxton parishes

We live in the Holy Land, in Ramallah, right next door to a mosque.

The mosques are all closed now, although we hear the call to prayer throughout the day.

But this time the words bellowing from the loudspeaker are different and it strikes me every single time I hear them.

Instead of saying come to prayer in Arabic they say pray in your homes.

The call to prayer is something I've heard for my entire life and it's so innate for Muslims. The first time I heard this new version I got goosebumps because I thought—wait, you can't change that.

The Palestinian territories are already dealing with occupation by Israel, three generations worth of people living in refugee camps and now we also have the coronavirus pandemic to consider.

We just don't have the resources to be able to cope if the coronavirus were to spread widely.

There are only about 100 ICU beds in the entire West Bank and not enough ventilators, either.

That's probably why the government acted quickly and aggressively.

Shortly after an outbreak among a group of religious tourists and hotel workers in Bethlehem, authorities moved to shut down the entire West Bank, shuttering both schools and workplaces.

Luckily, we seem to have been relatively spared so far.

The government here mounted a better response than the U.S. It's strange to see the difference between the two places when usually the health disparities are the other way around. (I moved from New York City a few years ago to help strengthen health systems here.)

I'm not an ICU or Emergency Room doctor so I'm not on the frontlines of dealing with the coronavirus.

But because so many facilities, including outpatient clinics, have shut down, I've been doing a lot of general paediatrics work to relieve some of the strain on the health care system.

People are terrified to go to emergency rooms right now.

The health care system here is already stretched thin even without a global pandemic.

I'm working from home for the most part and doing a lot of telemedicine calls.

A few times a week, I typically have to step out to see sick kids but I take precautions.

I have an N95 mask and wear a pair of scrubs that I strip off as soon as I come through the door.

I immediately take a shower before having any contact with the family.

This year is such a huge exception.

Normally, people are breaking their fast in groups.

Whether you break your fast at a mosque or in someone else's home, there's a collective feeling that you will be with people who have been sharing the same struggle and experience of Ramadan.

I didn't realize the importance of community during Ramadan so strongly until this year, when it has been taken away from us. Continue reading

From a social work perspective, it is hard to know where to begin, with the burdens carried by social workers in the present, or with the possibilities facing the planet in the longer run.

Whichever we chose, there is one certainty and that is social suffering.

It's the stock-in-trade of social work and an assured outcome of a crisis like this that we know will impact unevenly in structurally unequal societies like ours.

What might this mean now and into the future?

Already, lockdown in Aotearoa-New Zealand is multiplying the strains on the many children and families who don't have the luxury of material security: warm homes, possessions, savings and middle-class social capital.

Not that you would know this from watching the nauseating television features that seem to assume that the trials (and solutions) facing the inconvenienced well-off - with their over-flowing pantries, gleaming designer kitchen islands and endless technological aids for their beautiful and entitled children - have any meaning to the other New Zealand of bare floors, cold, damp, scarcity, trouble and anxiety.

I can only think that privileged people actually believe that the insulated bubbles of plenty presented in such ‘distraction television' programmes represent a common reality - that the other reality does not exist.

And, for many, I guess it doesn't.

Middle-class life, and the burning questions of recipes and online exercise routines and educational software, is somehow perceived to be a shared narrative.

The clever solutions to boredom are something we can all take pride in.

We don't see the struggles of the other New Zealand on our TV screens - it is not what the ‘we are all in this together' message is made of.

We might get the odd flick to the tireless food bank helpers boxing up parcels - but, of course, those at the bottom of the neoliberal heap are disenfranchised in our social system and only get to be on TV in the form of shock and scandal bait.

However, social work is the occupation that walks - sometimes without invitation - into the homes of disenfranchised citizens every day.

The inadequacy of greed-based economics is exposed in this encounter, although pushing the problem back up the chain to where it originates - in the flaws inherent to liberal capitalism - has been carefully erased from most social work job descriptions over the last 30 years.

These are demanding times for social work in so many ways.

We don't see the struggles of the other New Zealand on our TV screens - it is not what the ‘we are all in this together' message is made of.

This takes me to the bigger picture.

I would not want to appear disloyal in this period of high-stakes national emergency.

This is clearly a time for unity and the Ardern coalition government has done a very impressive job to date, saving lives by going hard, going early and going carefully.

Ego has not got in the way of medical advice about how to combat rampant infectious disease. I think readers will have little trouble thinking of world leaders who have been less effective.

In Aotearoa-New Zealand and the wider world there are some fascinating questions in the medium- to long-term. Continue reading

Uber Eats continues to charge high commission rates.

When the country moves to Alert Level 3 the problem for some may well be to decide how their restaurant meals will be delivered.

But there is a growing number who cannot even buy food from the supermarket.

Earlier this month the CEO of the Christchurch City Mission Matthew Mark told Newshub he feared the more elongated the lockdown the more demand would increase.

He said we know that the lockdown is necessary, and appears to be working to stemming the spread; however, we also need to be aware of the spread of other resultant factors.

"As businesses are closing their doors permanently resulting in increased unemployment, the reduction of hours and/or levels of pay and the changing dynamic of our environment."

On Wednesday Auckland City Missioner Chris Farrelly said some of those people needing help have never been to a food bank before.

"Now we have this new group who have been affected by business closures, reduced hours, pay cuts, some of those in precarious work arrangements, who've just suddenly found themselves unable to feed their children."

Murray Edridge from the Wellington City Mission said they've seen a 400 per cent increase in the need for food parcels.

He says the sharp increase shows the financial pressure New Zealanders are under during the pandemic.

Some of those people are elderly or have vulnerable family members or young children, and they just can't get to a supermarket.

"Quite frankly, some people are very afraid of leaving the house, and we're seeing that."

A support package to bolster the delivery of food and welfare assistance by local authorities and Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Groups has been approved by the government.

Source

• newshub.co.nz
• thespinoff.co.nz
• newshub.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• Image: hcamag.com