Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something... It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months.

Today we gather once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was. But the Eucharist has always been this way. Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. Every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends.