Here’s a dispatch from the center of the evolving pandemic — which where I live.
When the national epicenter for the coronavirus is 13 miles away from one’s home, life becomes a place somewhere between Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Gabriel Garcia Márguez’s “Love in a Time of Cholera.”
If you live in major urban areas — think New York City and greater Washington, D.C. — you can expect to see these patterns sooner, rather than later. What’s in your newspapers this morning?
Back to Kirkland — the expensive suburb (described here by the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have never been). Kirkland is merely one of several cities on Seattle’s Eastside where this thing has hit. Kirkland used to be the place we’d go for some beach time on Lake Washington when I was in high school. It was unglamorous and kind of shabby until the tech boom hit, Microsoft moved into neighboring Redmond and Google began gobbling up reams of office space in Kirkland, sending rents soaring.
Living two suburbs away as I do, I can say that the pall over Kirkland is now upon us all. Visiting local stores is like entering the Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen the shelves at Trader Joe’s so empty. Target has zero, I repeat zero, cough drops. Lines are forming at the local Costco first thing in the morning so folks can get toilet paper. The King County bus system greets you with hygiene announcements when you board.
We will get to religious groups and coverage in a moment. Hang in there with me.
Traffic for the past few days has been delightfully free of gridlock but it feels, writes one Seattle Times columnist, like Seattle is being symbolically quarantined from the rest of America. Conventions, conferences and meetings are being cancelled left and right. The Seattle-based Alaska Airlines put lots of flights on sale, begging folks to fly or buy before the end of March. But interestingly, while one school district has totally shut down, the others are not.
For instance, the Lake Washington School District — in which Kirkland is based -- is open. People are still riding in trains, buses and ferries around the Puget Sound area. Local music clubs were full Friday night and area concerts and sports events still happened over the weekend.
What’s creeping everyone out, as the Seattle Times is reporting, is the question of how this bug showed up on the Eastside in the first place.
“The general consensus is that most of us have been exposed,” said (Kirkland resident Kristin) Dorwin, who lives in the Finn Hill neighborhood of Kirkland, about three miles from Life Care Center. “It’s out there, and they’re just not testing. There’s no way to know the extent of the spread.”
One question that has unnerved residents: How did the virus get to Kirkland in the first place? Health officials haven’t yet identified Kirkland’s patient zero, or whether that person had traveled elsewhere.
Religious groups, which are eager to please, have been the first to cut back their gatherings.
A number of synagogues or Jewish community centers either cancelled their Purim parties or moved it to six weeks from now. Celebrations of Holi, the Hindu festival, were cancelled as well.
A Seattle Times piece that ran Thursday barely makes a dent in this coverage.
Across the Puget Sound region, as public health officials cautioned against large gatherings in the hopes of slowing the spread of coronavirus, some religious groups and houses of worship started canceling services — or finding creative ways to pray.
King County officials have recommended, though haven’t yet mandated, that people at a higher risk of developing serious symptoms from COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, stay home and avoid large groups. They said those recommendations are particularly important for people over 60 and those with a compromised immune system.
Temple De Hirsch Sinai, a Reform congregation in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, will stream its Shabbat services Friday night and Saturday morning, rather than have congregants come in person.
That’s not an option for all synagogues: Orthodox congregations abide by religious rules that restrict them from using technology on the Sabbath, the day of rest. Capitol Hill Minyan, a Jewish Orthodox prayer group that meets at a retirement community, announced on its website that it was suspending services as of March 4.
Further down, the writer gets to the Christians.
Church leaders said that Sunday’s services will be different — offering plates, friendship pads and bulletins will not be passed around. The community will also refrain from shaking hands when greeting each other.
We’re not hearing half of it.
The Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, which covers western Washington, issued guidelines asking that all baptismal fonts be drained, that no wine be served at Communion, that people refrain from the Passing of the Peace custom during services (whereby congregants shake hands with each other) and even stop the passing of the offering plate.
What really changed the climate here was when, on last Wednesday, the governor of Washington state made not-so-veiled threats to use his executive powers to shut down all meetings of more than 10 people. After that, various religious groups could not cancel their events fast enough.
Journalists, think about this. If there’s any group near you that has regular gatherings of more than 10 people, it’s the churches, temples, mosques and synagogues.
Just minutes after midnight on Thursday, the largest church in the area — an evangelical congregation known as Overlake Christian Church — cancelled its massive Refresh conference for parents of adopted and foster children. (Overlake is in Redmond). Some 2,000 people (including me) were expected as well as reams of speakers, vendors and mental health professionals.
A lot of folks had been planning and saving up for this conference all year and had gone to extraordinary lengths to get sitters for their challenging kids. Some had already flown in or were all set to catch planes when this ill-advised decision was made.
My heart really went out to some of these poor parents who were already in town and dying for two days of uplifting workshops only to be sitting forlornly at the Redmond Towne Center Marriott going through a pile of leftover free gift bags.
Along with the surprise announcement, organizers informed parents that none of their registration fees would be refunded. I had only paid $20, but I pitied the folks who had paid a lot more not to mention airplane fares. Some 2,000 people were expected at this event and, if each paid the full $95 registration fee, that is $190,000 that just walked off. Now I know a lot of people paid less than that because they registered early but still we’re probably talking about at least $100K that disappeared. I know the church got some blowback on that, as they sent out a follow-up statement saying they needed that money to pay off expenses. But that’s unethical. You don’t ding the folks who paid for an event (that never happened) to pay off your own bills. Where, I wondered, is coverage of all this? I emailed a contact at the Seattle Times offering to write a story on this. No response but a few hours later, the newspaper did post the above piece with no mention of Refresh.
At the Refresh conference, the risk of passing infection on was lower than minimal and the decision to cancel was, basically, based on fear. The Seattle Sounders, our pro soccer team, went ahead and played on Saturday night, attracting thousands of people. For religious groups to assume their meeting places are charnel houses of infection is alarmist — but they seemed first in the line of fire in terms of places offering to cut back.
As Amber Scorah said in her recent book “Leaving the Witness,” (which is about her time as a missionary in China for the Jehovah’s Witnesses): Absurdity becomes truth when enough people agree to it.
Day after day, local TV has been on all this like a blanket, posting breathless updates. So has the Times, all of it adding to the climate of fear around Puget Sound. My local food bank is shutting down next week and the folks there they don’t get near the crowds that the bars do. There will be a lot of desperate folks in my town needing food.
The inconvenience suffered by the 2,000 Refresh registrants is being repeated elsewhere worldwide with Saudi Arabia cancelling visits to Mecca for now. All bets are off as to what will happen around the time of the hajj in July. And the poor Italians in the northern part of their country can’t even go to Communion, according to this New York Times story.
There’s been some creative reporting around the country on what houses of worship propose to do. The Washington Post is leading the way on coverage even though the disease only just now touched the Beltway. There’s even some comic relief. Don’t you just love the story about the New York state attorney general telling televangelist Jim Bakker to stop pedaling his coronavirus “cure?”
The Post also reported on a Philadelphia congregation where the Communion servers are going to use disposable gloves as a way of allaying peoples’ fears. I thought it brought out some good points about Communion being a moment of intimacy with Christ that cannot be jeopardized by the current hysteria.
After working with a consultant and church lay leaders, First Presbyterian made a big switch Jan. 1 — having all congregants leave their seats and come forward to receive a freshly torn piece of bread and cup of wine (or grape juice) from one of four servers rather than taking wafers from trays passed through the pews.
“When people come forward, you get to look them in the eye,” the pastor said. “You get to say: ‘The body of Christ, broken for you, the blood of Christ, shed for you.’ ”
Then, a few weeks ago, “things got crazy,” he said. News about the coronavirus was everywhere — and way overblown, in Gray’s view. A nurse in the congregation approached him with worry.
“I told her, ‘We’ll talk and pray about it,’ ” he recalled.
Gray said he thought the flu was a bigger concern. He worried about changing the service again and harming the delicate balance they had worked for. And with a theologically conservative parish split down the middle politically, he said, he also was worried about how his own reaction to the virus would come across. With the president saying the media was exaggerating the threat, whatever he did seemed to be dragging politics into worship.
There are lots of angles out there. The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on Mormon temples that are being closed in places like Rome, Italy and of course, here in the Seattle area and how overseas missionaries are taking precautions.
This story is going to keep on keeping on. The first industries to take a huge hit from this will be travel-and-hotel-related business, as people are already cutting back on travel, especially to places like greater Seattle. On Saturday morning, I got an email about a conference specializing in Arctic issues — scheduled for mid-April on the Seattle waterfront — has been postponed.
People are panicking and, as the Center for American Progress points out, fear multiplies on fear, which is why our economy is taking a dive.
On a side note, I wrote a post two months ago about certain Pentecostal movements that put out a lot of optimistic prophecies about 2020 earlier this year. Not one of these “prophets” said anything about the modern-day plague just around the corner.
There’s a ton of evolving coronavirus-and-religion stories out there as Easter and Passover approach.
As tmatt noted in last week’s “Crossroads” podcast, many houses of worship can always livestream services. But here’s another news angle: Are there any out there refusing to give into fear and instead continuing ministries to the poor and forgotten? Christianity Today recently ran an essay saying that the history of the church abounds with examples of Christians stepping into the darkness of suffering to shine as lights. During a plague in AD 251 that swept the Roman empire, many Christians ministered to the suffering — and sometimes died as a result — rather than fleeing the cities.
If the religious folks are doing the same thing today, let’s hear about it.
Want to add that one disturbing trend I am seeing is to blame the messenger. A friend of mine from church had just posted about there being no toilet paper available at Costco when one of his Facebook friends wrote: “I think the media is stirring thus up be bigger than it really is and they are going overboard in an effort to hurt President Trump and our economy.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
As for here in the Emerald City, our state governor is threatening to make our state like northern Italy in terms of clamping down on social events.
Can a state official actually forbid houses of worship to hold services? We may get to find that out soon.