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Dear Jeffrey,
We last gathered for worship in the Memorial Church sanctuary on March 1, 2020, the first Sunday of Lent. The Rev. Ian Oliver, minister of Yale’s Battell Chapel, was our guest preacher, and our student deacons spent the afternoon on retreat with Yale’s student deacons. By the next week, our sanctuary was closed and shortly after that, our students packed up and left, leaving the campus still and quiet. I don’t think many of us imagined then that, when Lent came around again, we would still be teaching and learning on Zoom alone and worshipping together around WHRB’s livestream. I certainly didn’t.
But although we are not yet back inside the sanctuary and covid-19 remains a threat, there is a change in the air. A new administration is focusing its energies on addressing the pandemic through vaccination and the encouragement of public health practices. An eloquent inaugural poet, Amanda Gorman, ’20, has found language for where we have been as a nation and where we might go. And the students who have returned to campus this spring, and those who are learning around the world, inspire us all with their energy, commitments and hope.
Here at the Memorial Church, we are looking forward to the transformations that the spring semester will bring. Once more, our Lenten journey lies ahead of us. Once more, we will remember we are dust on Ash Wednesday, follow Jesus into the desert, and draw near as he preaches, teaches and heals. We will share his last supper with his friends and followers, mourn his death, and rise with him to new life on Easter morning. In this moment of loss and fragility, our annual pilgrimage through Lent offers us an opportunity to reorient ourselves toward the renewal of our spirits, our community, and the world around us. It is an opportunity to practice staying turned toward love no matter what.
We hope you will join us in worship, study, service, and fellowship this semester in all the ways you are able. We will continue to worship together on Sunday mornings at 11 am on WHRB, 95.3 FM, and WHRB.org and to welcome guest preachers who will challenge and inspire us, including Harvard Chaplains the Rev. Rita Powell, Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid, and the Rev. Adam Dyer; Professor Dudley Rose of Harvard Divinity School; and climate activist and Writer-in-Residence at HDS, Terry Tempest Williams. We will continue to draw upon the Harvard University Choir’s rich archive of music for Sunday services, and for Harvard’s 2021 ArtsFirst (April 19-20), the Choir and Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra will present a virtual performance of Bach’s Magnificat. Our students will record their individual parts at home, which will then be assembled by our colleagues in Harvard Media Services. Details of the exact time of the presentation will be forthcoming.
On Zoom, our Faith and Life Forum will continue its conversation with guest preachers and others about the life of faith and the life of the world, and our Sunday School will continue to gather the children of our community for religious education. The Practicing Hope book group will meet monthly to discuss lives and movements that have helped us imagine new ways of living, and each Thursday evening at 7 pm, we will share a practice of hope on Instagram Live that you can experiment with in your own life. Our Student Advisory Board and our Student Deacons will continue their work together, work that influences and shapes the ministry of our church. And our Grants Committee will work with us to fund projects of care and support for our most vulnerable neighbors. We are so grateful that we are able to continue to gather in all these ways, albeit virtually, as a community.
Last Lent, as the pandemic was beginning, we considered the teaching of the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The virus was, and is, an unseen thing that moves among us invisibly, leaving its terrible mark. As we look toward the beginning of a new Lenten journey, how can follow in the path of unseen things that give life instead? May the vision of a world in which everyone’s humanity is reverenced and cherished, a world in which we all take responsibility for the common good, be the contagion that spreads and keeps spreading, among us and beyond us.
With love,
Stephanie Paulsell
Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church of Harvard University
Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies, Harvard Divinity School
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