Born (Again) in Diaspora

I went to sleep the night of Easter feeling accomplished. I had successfully navigated the most bizarre week of church services I’ve ever encountered. Even having served multiple churches at one time, I have never had so many services. This year, it wasn’t from holding services at multiple buildings, but rather because for each service, I was tripling everything up; we had in-home liturgies for people to hold with only their families, I made supplemental videos for Facebook and Youtube to fill in the gaps, and separately celebrated the Eucharist with my family in the church building. Setting aside the sheer number of things to be done, so many of them were completely new to me and required technological experience that was beyond my training. It was an exhausting week, but it all went well and the liturgical aspects ended at Noon on Sunday with us standing in our driveway, as a large snow storm began, joining with a coordinated community effort to sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (despite the fact that we were using different, and I might add better, lyrics than anyone else in town.) It was a difficult and rewarding week and when I laid back on my pillow, I felt as though I had achieved something; it had been a very trying number of days, but I’d made it through and felt stronger for having done it. I looked forward to a well earned sleep and to the joy of waking up in Eastertide. But when I woke up, something unexpected happened.

Nothing happened.

Don’t get me wrong, I slept. And when I woke up it was indeed Eastertide. Monday in Bright Week had arrived. However, where I expected to find the world renewed, bursting with color and potential, I instead found six inches of snow and a reminder for a Zoom Meeting. In past years, I’ve felt a release as Bright Week arrived. I’ve still had many commitments, like midweek Mass, meetings, and projects, but it always felt like a corner had been turned. This year, I looked outside and saw nothing new (except for the snow) and where there should have been a corner, I saw only a long stretch of the same restrictions and the same new technology and the same isolation. I began to realize I was feeling the same thing that I had felt through the latter part of Lent and through Holy Week: I’m alone in the Wilderness.

Now, I’m not actually alone. I have my wife and daughter, which is beyond wonderful. I have numerous meetings over Zoom and other platforms, which connect me to a number of people. I do the family grocery runs, so I see (from a reasonable and well-gloved distance) all sorts of people. There’s still a feeling, though, that no matter how much time I have with my family or with others via phone or video or otherwise, that the vast majority of my time is filled with having something to say, but no one available to hear it. On Monday, I awoke with a sense that felt vaguely like isolation, but was actually something else.

DIASPORA.

That vague feeling of being kind of alone, of having something to say and no one to hear it, is the feeling of being in a diaspora. The concept is pretty straightforward; it refers to a group of people who are “scattered” from their communal home, striving to hold on to their own culture while also struggling to find a place to fit in a new and foreign culture. It may seem counterintuitive because we’re not scattered from our homes, we’re stuck in them! But, in a way, we are scattered; we’re scattered from each other and can’t interact physically, we’re scattered from our workplaces and the daily/weekly routines they provide, and we’re scattered from our comfort zones as we struggle to find new, virtual versions of our previous lives. The functional difference between our diaspora and the Babylonian Exile is that we have all been scattered together.

In that great scriptural Diaspora, the Israelites were scattered in and among the Babylonians who continued to live within a culture they already knew and understood. It was up to the Jewish people to find a way to fit in as best they could. For most of them, this meant their previous culture was all but lost. Many of us are feeling like that now; as though the world we knew so recently is slipping away, and will soon be all but out of reach. But not all of the Israelites lost hold of that culture, or at least not in that same way. The Exile itself was the time that gave us Jeremiah, Obadiah, and Ezekiel. In the period after the Exile, we got Daniel, Zechariah, and Malachi. These individuals, and others like them, did not lose grip of the previous culture; they pivoted.

For example, it was during the Babylonian Exile, the Diaspora, that the Hebrew Alphabet was created. Before then, the main written language of the Israelites was something called Proto-Hebrew, a root language they shared with the Phoenicians and Canaanites. Likewise, there was a huge rise in prophets, people with a special vocation (and a special relationship with God) who worked to correct Jewish behavior and understanding. Though there had always been individuals who were set apart for that kind of mission, the Exile created a swell that informed Jewish behavior in their new surroundings. Also, without access to the centralized temple, the expression of their faith was forced to pivot, giving rise to the earliest forms of Rabbinic Judaism, shifting focus from ritualized sacrifice to ritualized behavior.

Now all of this is not meant to be some kind of condensed history lesson. Okay, it kind of is, but not for the sake of us taking solace in the fact that others have survived this kind of displacement. Rather, it is meant to highlight what was gained, rather than what was lost. In the Diaspora, the Israelites developed an alphabet more in tune to their uses and more expressive of their unique identity. They found great leaders that helped them understand who they were and how their relationship with God was grounded. They even began a shift from reliance on the centralized temple to new rituals that could be exercised throughout their daily lives.

These are the same issues we are struggling with in this bizarre period, this virtual diaspora. We are struggling to understand how to connect with each other without dangerous physical proximity. We need new languages that express ourselves and identify the Church’s unique culture. We are struggling to find answers about what is happening, how long this will last, and whether we’ll ever get “back to normal.” We need leaders who can help ground us in our relationships to God and each other. We are struggling to express our faith without the spaces and liturgies that have defined the faith for so long. We need to develop (and rediscover) rituals that are expressed in our daily behavior.

This Eastertide has begun with many of us feeling loss and isolation. There is a sense that this year feels “shallow” compared to what we’ve come to expect. Our world has shifted and we are finding ourselves in the wilderness of a new kind of diaspora, one in which both our old culture and this new one both feel somehow foreign and impossible to reconcile. We are not, however, alone. We are surrounded not only by our immediate families, but also by a global sea of people in the same awkward position. In times much like these, the God’s chosen people rediscovered themselves; not perfectly, but still in a manner that moved them forward.

I can’t say what will happen to us on the other side of this diaspora. What I can say is that I’m not going to give up hope. I believe that if we find ways to come together and share our fear and our new (and old) ideas that something not just functional, but in fact quite wonderful, could grow out of all of it. Not that the world will go back to what it was, but rather, that we can exist in new and old and imperfect and cumbersome and eloquent and compassionate ways. We are alone in the wilderness, but we needn’t be the only voice crying out.