ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — It is the holiest of days in the Christian faith, and, 2,000 years after the life of Jesus Christ, it’s being celebrated in a way the world has never quite seen before.
“Attending an Easter service in my own church but by virtual mode was almost surreal,” Jeanne Prickett told First Coast News after participating in an Easter service performed at the First United Methodist Church in St. Augustine. Like her fellow worshipers, Prickett was only able to "attend" online as establishments of almost every kind have been forced to close their doors during the coronavirus crisis.
“This has never really happened in my lifetime,” said Patti Schiavo, who has been attending Catholic mass at the Cathedral Basilica a few blocks away for more than 24 years. “And I was talking to my mom and this never happened in her lifetime.”
Not just a first for Christians, as the world’s three largest organized faiths – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – celebrate Easter, Ramadan and Passover, respectively this month.
Juana Jordan, a pastor at First United Methodist Church, contemplated her role in navigating alongside her peers locally and worldwide.
“[To] continue to illustrate that there is something good that is going on, even in the midst of our darkest hour,” is part of how she envisioned that role.
“I’ve really just had to go within myself and say that God is with me,” she said.
Her message to her congregation has been an encouragement of spiritual strength reminiscent of the resurrection central to Christian faith.
“What Resurrection Sunday reminds us is that we don’t just lie down and die,” Jordan said. She also told First Coast News what she’d been challenging her listeners to do.
“Just look and see, where do we see Jesus? Where has Jesus been popping up in St. Augustine, where has he been popping up in your own home or your own community?” she said, elaborating that such manifestations can be found in acts of kindness.
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But it was the medium – not the message – that’s grabbed worldwide attention and transformed how so much business, including that of faith, is carried out. Televised religious services have been happening for decades, but never have so many local services been disseminated online.
“It was still a rich experience,” Prickett affirmed. “It wasn’t quite the same as accepting the wine and bread from the pastor."
Another aspect Prickett said she missed the most about typical services was the communal sharing of faith.
“…Where we’ve lost the immediate connection and the intimate setting of being together,” she noted, “and yet it can enhance your singular focus if you want it to.”
That latter point – one of choice, she said – was pivotal.
“It became so personal and just so moving,” she said.
Although their denominations are different, many of Prickett’s and Schiavo’s observations seemed nearly parallel, including one particular adjective.
“It’s surreal. It really is,” Schiavo observed after watching the mass offered at the Cathedral Basilica.
Schiavo, whose children range in age from seven to 22, wanted to re-create the Easter experience as authentically as possible.
“We got up, we got dressed, we did our hair, we did everything we would do as if we were actually going to church,” she said.
Schiavo, who recently traveled to Israel and visited the site believed to be the tomb of Christ, said her family has tried to absorb the spirit and traditions of Holy Week as always, although the means to do so have altered significantly.
“I know on [Good Friday], up in Jacksonville, friends of ours had, actually, a drive-through Stations of the Cross,” she said.
Another similarity between Schiavo and Prickett was what they missed about the usual services.
“The actual physical closeness of hugging [fellow parishioners],” Schiavo said, “of being really together.”
And yet another:
“For us as Catholics, we’re not able to receive the Eucharist in Holy Communion.”
That sacrament – accepting by faith the Body and Blood of Christ into one’s own body – is considered by many to be the most indispensable part of Christian ritual.
“And so we have a prayer that we ask the Lord to come into our hearts as if we did receive Him sacramentally,” Schiavo explained.
Prickett’s household had a different solution: her mother, a Methodist deacon, administered Communion.
Apart from those adjustments, local services delivered online included ritual presented much as it has been on television for years. But to those accustomed to attending in-person, it seems nothing can fully replace the experience of worshiping with a congregation.
“I feel that this powerful experience will not fade,” Prickett predicted of when the coronavirus has passed. “We’ll remember it and yet it will be much more powerful to be back together again, especially the first time.”
Schiavo said “I cannot wait to get back to my church, to just being in the midst of all of my fellow cathedral parishioners,” tempering that ache by observing that “even amidst all of this and all of the restraints that we have, we can all still feel very, very close to the Lord.”
In her words with First Coast News, Jordan echoed some of her own sermon.
“Today is still a day of celebration,” she insisted, adding a thread among the most common in any faith. “I cannot live in fear, but I must continue to hold on to hope that there is something better.”