Covid Fear and Trembling

City Safari: By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor

Thom Nickles on Safari

Wed, Jul 15, 2020

How has the pandemic affected going to church, or sitting in Rittenhouse Square, and the current state of the ads on Philadelphia Craigslist?  

Church:

As you enter the church (fully masked) your temperature is taken by someone in the parish. You squeeze out a bit of hand sanitizer and keep the standard social distance. When it comes time to receive Holy Communion, you follow the guidelines established by the Bishop. Going to church now is no longer a simple walk ‘in’ and ‘out’ affair but a complicated dance that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. 

Guidelines, however sensibly constructed, are not going to please every parishioner. Some parishioners insist on a 100 percent protection: they want the Bishop to revise the ancient rubrics of Communion to placate their pandemic fears. They want absolute certainty that the environment is bubble-tight, a super structure of infallible protection.

100% protection does not exist in life. Nor does it exist in church. In church, one at least, expects the faithful to have a modicum of faith that would bolster the thin line between absolute safety and minimal risk. Bolstering the line between safety and risk is where faith comes in. What I’ve learned since this pandemic is that some believers, seemingly, have little faith. 

That’s why many churches are still nearly empty on any given Sunday, even with the 25-person limit set for indoor spaces. And yet people think nothing of flooding the Parkway and the Museum of Art area to protest, 70,000 strong, many not wearing masks and none of them practicing social distancing. One might say that these protest politicos have faith in social change, as if social change was a god that answered prayers and provided their lives with meaning.

My nearly empty parish church, that I see Sunday after Sunday speaks very much to this lack of faith. It’s disheartening. The pastor, in his patient benevolence, never calls attention to the empty space but I can read the disappointment in his eyes.  He’s trying to be charitable and understanding. 

There will always be people who don’t come out of foxholes until the war is long over.  

         

Last week in his homily the pastor said something remarkable. He was speaking about the dangerous and unpredictable times we live in, a time when science fiction has become the new reality. He said that people who have been away from church for years are asking him to teach them to pray. They have forgotten how to pray but they want to learn because they feel the world is in danger.  

One Sunday after Divine Liturgy, I visited the Parkway to take a look at the city’s tent city, Camp Maroon, then walked to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul is see if it was open. The cathedral’s doors were locked tight, as were the doors of Saint John the Evangelist Church at 13^thand Chestnut Streets. While all the city churches seemed to be closed, I was able to slip into Macy’s, which, architecturally at least, has the look of a large temple. 

Rittenhouse Square:

For me, the real open-air temple during the pandemic has been Rittenhouse Square. Sitting in Rittenhouse Square has been something that I’ve been doing at least once a week with a good friend from Germantown. Sitting in the Square has taken the place of going to an indoor coffee house, our preferred meeting place before science fiction became reality. Our ritual involves buying coffee at a nearby WAWA (not the boarded-up WAWA on Broad Street destroyed by looters) and then walking to the Square and finding a bench in the shade.

We usually wind up sitting near groups of Square regulars. These guys cover the waterfront in terms of looks and disposition. Some are older, some look as if they might be homeless or close to homelessness while others just look like gritty city types who have the ability to hobnob with any class of people—bum, society matron or chief executive officer. These men—they are all men—seem to know one another. Seeing them week after week, I’ve noticed that they all invariably say hello or nod to one another. None of them are wearing masks but, then again, my mask and my friend’s mask are not covering our faces but hanging loosely about our necks ready to be pulled up in an instant. Sitting there among the Square’s massive trees one doesn’t feel the need to keep covered up like women in Saudi Arabia.

I call this little community of Square habitués, the Square Rustics. The Square Rustics do a lot of walking around and changing benches, going from this friend to that, sometimes talking in wild spurts for a long time and then becoming quiet and sitting with their eyes closed in deep meditation as if contemplating this new world that we all find ourselves in.  

Going to the Square week after week I recognize many other regulars. The dog walkers, of course, are legion. The dogs I see tend to be nice looking and unique in some way, from miniature toy poodles to regal Greyhounds but rarely do I see the all-jawface of a pitbull, aka, the hound from hell, and that’s as it should be. Many of the people walking through the Square are not wearing masks while many do wear them. Those who wear masks do not scold those who don’t wear masks, so the Square is virtue-signal free, at least for now. 

         

The lockdown and the stress of recent months have produced quite a few ‘hurt’ human beings. Studies have shown that people who live alone and went through quarantine alone generally have a harder time adjusting to social reintegration when the city goes green. 

The psychological fallout from the quarantine’s solitude has now cursed them with agoraphobic tendencies. 

         

The newly minted agoraphobics don’t want to leave their apartments because they have no interest in mingling with people again.

Other strange behaviors that may be pandemic related would have to include the two people I observed walking through the Square holding large signs. The first, a male in shorts and flip flops, held aloft a large sign that read: Tell Me Something.  He had the look of a UPenn athlete but the fixed smile on his face was disturbing. In another instance, a fat girl with blue hair kept walking back and forth over the Square’s lawns holding a small sign, no doubt political, that nobody could read.  

Sexual anarchy on Craigslist: People Need People?

Then there are the changes on Craigslist Philadelphia. I discovered these changes quite by accident while attempting to post ad concerning a car garage. That’s when I noticed that quite a few of the ads in the business and general categories section of Craigslist were personal ads advertising for quick sex, foot rubs, body massages and hookups. Craigslist’s ban on personal ads several years ago was a shock to avid Craigslist users. For years, that rule was circumvented by personals being put in the Missed Connections or the Rants and Raves. While these rogue ads were often flagged by professional flaggers, many escaped the censor’s hammer and managed to survive. 

The pandemic and months of stay-at-home quarantine have unleashed a tsunami of personals in nearly every Craigslist category, including farm and garden, real estate, rooms wanted and pets.      

 By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor