The Church choirs will be silent this Easter.
In many Ugandan homes, the run-up to Easter, the most important Christian holiday, involves planning big meals. These will be replaced this year by small family affairs. The meals too are likely to be simpler. With a lockdown in place, many families will have to make careful choices about how much to cook so as to spread the amount of food available over several days. Then there is the question of cooking fuel. For both the well-to-do and the not so well-to-do, keeping enough charcoal, wood fuel or gas is really important. So, Easter this year may well turn out to be, in some ways, a less material and more spiritual celebration as will other religious observances in the coming months.
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan which will start later this month will be impacted likewise. Visits to the mosque may not be possible and iftars will be small family affairs. In Abu Dhabi where we live a greater part of the year, the Iftar tradition is a big part of the month of Ramadan. Huge Iftar dinners are hosted by hotels and in homes amplifying the generosity of Ramadan with lavish spreads and large gatherings.
This year all of it will be muted. The faithful will of course find ways to practice faith – perhaps even more meaningfully.
This is one of the many ways that the novel Coronavirus of 2019 is re-arranging our lives. Essentialism but not as “ the disciplined pursuit of less “or the many well-meaning push-back movements to the old, over-cluttered, over-scheduled world that centers materialism and consumption is back in a big way. The new essentialism of the pandemic is one paired with ‘existentialism’ as many communities confront painfully the many ways in which we are all human through the manner in which we are forced to acknowledge how to live, work and share community in the challenging conditions imposed on everyone by COVID19. So, no doubt Easter Mass will be special in its own way.
The Archbishop of Kampala Dr. Cyprian Kizito Lwanga in his guidelines issued for the Holy Week said, “Easter Mass will be celebrated in the Cathedral and in all our parishes without the faithful but who are invited to follow the ceremonies via the media”. This is a remarkable affair for the Catholic Church which unlike the new evangelical Christian movements has been slow in countries like Uganda to embrace technology for celebrating mass. “ I wish to thank the media houses that have enabled us to reach your homes during this trying moment” he concludes.
Fascinating.
Who would have imagined that technology, often an adversary as a grandson and heir apparent of modern science, would be today, the bridge to the antiquity of faith and its centuries of tradition? Is this pandemic healing that difficult relationship or forcing us to confront the reality that there was not much of a separation to start with?
A footnote of this pandemic will forever read “ Of the things that matter”.
My friend Dr. Ruffino Ezama, the Comboni missionary and academic said in a text about this coming Sunday that ‘ the churches will be empty, and the tomb is empty, but Christ is risen”.
