Coronavirus dashboards.

Once in a while, I visit RealClearPolitics, the politics opinion-piece and polling aggregation site.  I popped onto the site today for the first time in a while, and was interested to see that it is maintaining a couple of scorecards, or dashboards as we call them these days in the corporate world, on COVID-19 fatalities and confirmed cases.

Post Pandemic: Winners, Losers, and Challenges

Most of us would agree that life will be different in some regards after the crisis has passed.
Some winners which I predict:  science and research.  We have found out that we ignore it to our peril, and that government funding of it, at least as regards some of it, is necessary.  Perhaps we will see a renaissance of learning about virology, epidemiology, and medicine.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter, everyone!
This song, All Shall Be Well, by the St. Louis Jesuits, is an old one, not in the missalettes any more, but the message of hope is one we need.

A Paragraph from a Neighbor

My neighbor and friend, Brenda Fairaday, (and a main stay at Corpus Christi parish in NYC) sent a link to an essay about Thoreau and Walden Pond. She pointed to its closing paragraph with this: "The final paragraph of this well considered article could easily describe our church/Church and community."

"It’s a monument designed by no one, built by everyone. It’s assembled one piece at a time, over time, by individuals who will never meet, but who, in our devotion, form a community of souls. It’s a monument that honors the dead, but is living, changing, growing. During the present crisis that is isolating us, this monument has the potential to bring us together: It is an instructive emblem to contemplate, and a consoling one."

The article itself is by Holland Cotter of the NYTimes.

Hot Cross Buns

You know the little ditty:
"Hot cross buns, hot cross buns!
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot cross buns!
If you haven't any daughters,
Give them to your sons!"

Drinking our cup

This is my homily for today, Good Friday.  Pre-COVID-19, I was scheduled to preach today at the parish's normal Good Friday service.  As everything is now disrupted, our pastor asked our other deacon and me to collaborate on some sort of a service for Good Friday which could be recorded and put on our parish website.  According to liturgical law, deacons really should not lead the regular Triduum Good Friday service (although many are assigned to do it anyway, and I've done it in the past; pastors ask deacons to do this because there is no confection of the Eucharistic species on Good Friday, and this is a very intensive time of the year for pastors, especially those who don't have priests to help them).  So after kicking around a few ideas (Stations of the Cross, Evening Prayer), we decided to simply cobble together a Word Service: essentially, the Liturgy of the Word portion of the regular Good Friday service.  If you are sufficiently curious, you could watch it at the website link a few sentences above - I'm told that it will be available as of noon Central Time today.

If you do decide to watch it, I should explain something: I have a beard in the video.  I've spent most of my adult life without a beard.  When the stay-at-home order went into effect, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to let the beard grow out - it wasn't as though I had many public appearances upcoming.  (This was before our pastor decided to start recording the weekly masses.)  Besides, my wife likes me with a beard, although she may be the only one - I don't actually care for it that much, and mostly-friendly remarks from others indicate that they don't especially care for it, either.  Then, the day after we recorded the service, I heard a doctor on the radio state that beards and moustaches can be havens for the virus.  So I shaved off the beard that day, and I'm back to my clean-shaven self again.  The photo at the top of this post is pretty much what I look like now (although I may have needed a shave in the photo; I'm one of those guys who has a perpetual 5 o'clock shadow, even when my cheeks and chin feel smooth, so it's hard to tell).  At any rate, here is the text of the homily.

The Father Damien Corps

 Sorry to lumber onto Deacon Jim's turf, but a deacon down here and I have been talking about the freeze-out of priests for the last rites at hospitals. And lo, he has just sent me this from Jim's local paper. I couldn't wait to share it.

 https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-coronavirus-chicago-last-rites-priests-squad-20200406-ht5xzf3umna6vi5vfy5rntcz2a-story.html

   You go, Chicago guys.