Many years ago, I worked for a time on oil-rigs, mostly on land and for short periods. One of my lasting memories about being driven from rig to rig to rig on dusty roads is arriving in the depths of the night, walking into the sand-dunes, away from the constant roar of engines, looking up at the heavens and being knocked over by the brightness of the stars, with our native galaxy sailing overhead from horizon to horizon.
I've never seen starlight like that since, having lived in big cities ever since I left that occupation. One of the strange thing about living through the isolation that oil-field work forces upon you is that you start to treasure the things that are no longer possible. Therefore, when I say (often enough) that there should be a rush back to the churches when this virus event is over, I am speaking a little from experience. For, although I was little more than a weekly Mass attender (on Sundays), I emerged from the oilfield into the study of theology, I know not how. I had no interest in theology when I was in engineering school, except that I taught myself Latin then, at age twenty, because I had been informed that the Church had her own language and I was ignorant of it.
Isolation is therefore no stranger to me. Deprived of Holy Mass, as I was for weeks on end in my professional life, and deprived of Sunday Mass for months on end (for it was extremely unlikely that the few days I spent in the city between visits to the various oil-rigs would fall on Sundays), I turned my spirit of devotion towards the study of holy Scripture and towards the strong spirit of Catholic youngsters, who in those days were investing time heavily on websites and blogs to demonstrate their identity as Catholics.
And this is what we need to think about ourselves, as circumstances peel away the outward observances of our holy religion. Who are we? What are we? What does the word 'catholic' and what does the word 'christian' mean? Where is your heart? Have you given it to Christ entirely, or have you given it to Christ in part, or is church just something your parents or grandparents placed into your heart at an early age, hoping it would blossom later? I'll be quite honest and say that, for me, church was placed in my heart by my parents, hoping that it would blossom later. In university, when everything from my childhood fell away for me, there was only one constant - Mass attendance on Sunday. The Church meant something more to me than that, though, for even then there was a sentiment of the ancient in my experience of the Mass, and that's why the Latin meant so much, even at the age of twenty. It was a connection with generations of Christians who had gone before. And because I started to love that Church, spread through time and space, I gave my heart partially to Christ, and partially to the natural sciences, in particular physics and its practical branch, engineering. And I delighted in that. And the externals of religious observance were ripped away from me by my work, but the Church was not ripped away from me. And so I still delight in that dual love of the natural sciences and the theological sciences, for though my interest in physics and engineering remains (while my practical ability in it has declined), He who is the author of both was never far away. And there is some powerful thing in the priesthood, more powerful even than that which lay Catholics experience, that draws me everyday towards giving myself entirely to Christ and his Church.
This is what social isolation once did for me. I wonder what it could do for you.
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