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I completely and unshakeably believe that if you are closing your church out of safety, or you’re not going in person bc you don’t feel safe, God will find a way to give you and your people the same graces you and they would have had in the Sacrament.
I’m a *very* sacramental Christian. I don’t believe the sacraments are optional extras, I do believe in holy days of obligation, daily mass in normal times etc. But I also believe God is suffering with us and that he refuses to withhold a drop of his grace.
It’ll feel different, it’ll feel sad, it’s right to lament and to be angry and to cry. But God feeds and Jesus is the Bread of Life. ’Which of you, if your child asks for bread, will give them a stone?’ No one is getting a stone instead of being fed.
I want this to be reassuring, rather than preachy, and the opening/closing debate is a minefield. If you have closed, and it turns out to have been needless, or you’ve stayed at home when maybe you technically could have gone to Mass, all this still applies.
God knows we’re dealing with a bad situation with no perfect solution. All he asks is that we keep praying and do what we believe to be the loving thing. He‘ll keep feeding us & making us holy when we ask him to, because he refuses to lose a single one of us.
And that’s it. If you want to shout at me, please kindly don’t. I’m not saying open, I’m not saying close, I’m not saying no effort is required in leading a holy life. But I am saying that, above all of that, there is God and he’s got this and he’s got us.
I realise I sound biased toward closing; I don’t mean to. I know good vicars who are staying open, and good vicars who are closing. I believe them all to be doing either out of love for God and his people. And now I really will say no more than that!
