HomeCommunity NewsA New Attitude: ‘Welcome to Holland’

A New Attitude: ‘Welcome to Holland’

By Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady
Special to The Tribune

As the surge in COVID-19 cases continues, there are stricter guidelines for gatherings, including worship services. And there is now a strict prohibition of all singing in worship. In a recent update, L.A. County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis stated that there is also to be no Bible study, Sunday school or youth groups, and no singing or “group recitation.” Several church leaders attempted to see where there might be some flexibility. At one point, a pastor asked, “So we can walk into church, and be very quiet, and then walk out?” and Davis said, essentially, “yes.”

Rev. Jeffrey O’Grady.

With this announcement, I continue to wonder when we would be able to return for worship as a congregation occupying the same physical space — especially to sing. When singing, we participate in an important experience of using our voices alongside and in concert with the voices of others. Though we sing one melody, it’s with many voices of people differing in gender, age, ethnicity, experience, education and background. Not everyone is a soprano, or a baritone, yet there is the feeling of one body, a unity that is more than the sum of its parts. In many ways, music provides a model for the church as a way of enacting our unity. It’s not easy to hear that we will not be singing in church any time soon.
Let’s face it, churches are not known for their adaptability, yet churches have been remarkably creative and resilient during this pandemic. Many, including San Marino Community Church, have moved to online worship. Zoom weddings, live-streamed graveside services, Facetime appointments and Webex meetings of church boards, all contribute to a substantial acceleration of change for churches. It was an unexpected change, even unwanted. But life can be so unexpected.
In her book, “Welcome to Holland,” Emily Perl Kingsley illustrates how easily we become disoriented when the unexpected happens, in this case the birth of a child with a disability. Kingsley writes,
“It’s like this . . . when you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip — to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, ‘Welcome to Holland.’
Holland?!? you say. ‘What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy!’ But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. . . . So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.’ And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away, because the loss of the dream is a very significant loss. Kingsley concludes the piece writing, “But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.
More than 56 million people in the United States have a disability. The needs of many of them, especially the need for corporate worship, is unmet because of physical barriers such stairs and doors, or communications barriers, such as sound amplification and large print and good lighting. But the most significant barriers are found in our attitudes on how to interact with the disabled. One of the benefits of online worship is that it makes it possible for those who are differently abled to attend worship without any of those barriers. Many elderly church members are worshipping from home for the first time. There are some silver linings after all.
In many ways we all feel like we’ve landed somewhere unexpected, not on the itinerary. It can and does create disappointment and discouragement. But there are some “very special” and “very lovely” things about Holland. We can’t spend our lives mourning the fact that it will be different in the future. Let’s mourn the losses we feel but then let’s take care to make sure this interruption to our lives, families, work and world change us for the good. The hardest thing to change, and the most difficult barriers are attitudinal.

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