To Join Again (Asher Gelzer-Govatos)

The risk of writing a piece that seeks to foster hope amid darkness is that time will shine its merciless ray on that hope and expose it as naïve, even silly. Though I don’t regret writing “Empty Churches” five years ago during the initial COVID shutdown, I do reread it with a twinge of embarrassment, a feeling that those rays of time burn bright on a central idea that could never have held weight.

In the essay, I suggested that the empty churches wrought by pandemic shutdowns could present an opportunity as well as a challenge, a chance for people to reflect in silence on the heart of the Christian faith. I still think that’s right: empty churches did provide a space for quiet contemplation, even a wrestling with God that might have been productive. And I hope that some people took advantage of this chance for greater reflection and meditation. But the legacy of the COVID-empty church has tended toward the other, more pessimistic option I mentioned—the hastening of already declining attendance, the further diminishment of church as a focal point of life.

For all that Christians worry about the reasons for people leaving church (A lack of Gospel preaching? Christian hypocrisy? The wrong political messaging?), many stop attending for the most prosaic reason: they get busy. Habits ingrained by faithful churchgoing ebb in the face of a life filled with distracting possibilities. The slow return of people to pews after COVID suggests a change in habit catalyzed by the pandemic. Teachers felt a similar seismic shift in the classroom; though students, unlike churchgoers, were forced to return, they came back altered. Primary among these changes was an even greater incapacity for sustained attention. 

In hoping that isolation and a close encounter with our own mortality would drive people to prayer and contemplation, I forgot to heed the wisdom of one of my favorite maxims, from the philosopher Blaise Pascal: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Pascal’s broader point in this passage is that people chase after distractions because, should they cease for a moment from diversion, their minds would fall back inevitably on the reality of death. The lockdown experience seemed to prove Pascal right. What did many of us do but chase after a string of ultimately unsatisfying diversions? Even those shared experiences that swept through the online sphere during lockdown proved ephemeral, with little lasting positive impact. If Tiger King is the most enduring cultural artifact of the COVID period, what does that say about our capacity for attention?

Wherever you fall on their necessity in the moment, the painful long-term consequences of church shutdowns have become clear—consequences heightened by the insistence of many churches that worship via screen was just as good as in person gathering. Without church as an aid to attention, a focal habit to contain our roving eyes and minds, we gave in en masse to an even greater sense of distraction. Many of my fellow Catholics, sans the ability to receive the Eucharist, forgot the sacrament’s place as the source and summit of our faith. Other Christians lost their taste for vital centering practices of their own: the preaching of the word, prayer, and communal singing.

Despite these bleak realities, I cannot quite let go of my sense of hope. After all, God has done great works in much more dire situations. There are even signs that the aftershocks of the pandemic have begun to awaken people to the more damaging aspects of our attention economy. Safeguarding measures for young people in the use and abuse of addicting technology and social media use have started to gain steam. High schools nationwide have suddenly begun banning the use of phones during the day. And anecdotes of people having epiphanies regarding the depths of their own inattention have become commonplace. 

While there’s no single, clear way to recall people from lives of distraction to lives centered on God, the Church can become a voice in the wilderness. It can call us back. It can offer us a different way. It can and it does still model faithfulness, inhabiting and nourishing practices that inculcate habits of attention. But we need to make the choice to join. If we are willing to adhere to the rhythms of Christian practice, another way of attention—a way of worship—beckons.

Whether the metrics suggest we succeed or fail in this endeavor, it is certainly worth the trying. The rest, as T.S. Eliot would say, is not our business. 

Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University. While completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, he was a member of the Carver Project’s reading group for graduate students in the humanities. 

Read Asher’s previous article from 2020: “Empty Churches”