By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

I’m feeling the sting. Three weeks and no Divine Liturgy, after spending my whole life being taught and teaching others that the Eucharist is central to the life of a Christian and the life of the Church, that the Eucharist is life-giving. I’m not even going to talk about the prospect of Holy Week at home and Feast of the Resurrection with no Eucharist. I don’t have words for this yet.

I remember my husband participating in long, almost daily conference calls between bishops and priests, each one torn apart about deciding what to do and how to instruct our congregations during a pandemic like this—torn apart by the reality of how sickness is spread on the one hand, and the faith that the Bread of Life is healing and life for us on the other.

The decision was made in the Coptic Orthodox Church, and in almost every other religious community, to ask the congregations to stay home. It seemed like this decision was a surrender to a scientific reality in opposition to faith in a spiritual reality. Yet as I watch my husband increase the daily prayer meetups with the congregation online, I’m became clearer and clearer that deciding to close the churches was a decision of faith.

Christian clergy live and breathe the call for people to GO TO CHURCH. I know this. My father and my husband are clergy. In the words of Russian Orthodox Patriach Kirill, “I have been preaching for 51 years, calling on people to come to church, overcome the gravitation of their own ill will and external circumstances, I dedicated my entire life to this call and I hope you understand how difficult it is for me to say now: refrain from visiting churches.” 

If the people who have dedicated their entire lives to encouraging, exhorting, and even pleading with people to come to church now ask us to stay home, it is for the sake of God and everyone He loves that we should STAY HOME.

This isn’t fear. THIS IS FAITH. In fact, this is faith from clergy who know that God can still work His works WITHOUT their direct involvement for a time.

It is faith to affirm that our prayers together from home can be as powerful as our prayers together in church.

It is faith to recognize that our prayers together from home are joined by the saints and angels and archangels.

It is faith to profess that our prayers from home will either spare us or lead us to the Kingdom during an epidemic like this.

It is faith that our prayers from home will lead MORE OF US back to the church.

It is faith to long for the Eucharist, knowing how essential it is to gather together in one body and partake of the body and blood of Christ, how our prayers at home only increased our desire and thanksgiving for the realization of our oneness in Christ.

One could compare this period away from the Eucharist to a marriage in a military family during deployment. There are times, sometimes years, when a spouse is deployed away from his or her wife or husband. An extended deployment does not in itself diminish their marriage bond or their faith in it. When they work to maintain their loving relationship from afar, it only makes the reunion sweeter.

Yet if they bicker from afar, their relationship will suffer when they are together. I have not heard of any time in history where division and dissention among Christians have brought others to the church. I have heard of how those divisions and dissentions have turned many away. The historic witness of Christianity has never been about a debate of whether or not we should meet once a week to partake of the Eucharist while the world around us is literally dying.

Rather, the historic witness of Christianity during times of plague have been compassion and mercy to those who are suffering OUTSIDE the Church. Church historian Eusebius records St. Dionysius of Alexandria’s letter about the third century Plague of Cyprian saying, “Most of our brother-Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of the danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ.” It is in fact this Christian witness—that of serving others—that contributed to the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire as well as forming the basis for the compassion in health care we now experience in modern medicine. When people are sick we care for them, and we protect the most vulnerable among us. This is how we witness. This is faith.

Asking everyone to stay home to protect our most vulnerable when every bone in our body cries out for us all to go to church – THIS is faith. Struggle for one another, service for one another, unceasing prayer for one another, love for one another – THIS is faith.

The end of this period is not yet in sight. We will be home for some time yet. We don’t know yet when we will gather again for the Holy Feast. Yet, without the promise of the Resurrection, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8, NKJV). If Abraham could go, not knowing where he was going, surely we can go through this time, knowing that we will be united with Christ either on earth when we can partake of the Eucharist again, or in Heaven where we will be with Him forever.

“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2, NKJV).

Phoebe Farag Mikhail is the author of Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church.

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