The lockdown context of Easter celebrations this year stimulated creative and participatory virtual pilgrimages, retreats and services.
Student Cross is an annual Easter pilgrimage of 11 legs to the Anglican and Roman Catholic shrines in Walsingham, Norfolk. It went ahead this year as a virtual pilgrimage with online liturgy daily during Holy Week, as well as a series on online stations of the cross four times a day.
Reflections on facebook by participants of all ages were varied and interesting and there were often images from previous years showing the beautiful countryside crossed. David Mottram shared a song he composed on the Passion for the Ely leg in 2009. Instead of carrying a large cross, participants this year wore or designed their own red crosses. The pilgrimage included a Maundy Thursday invitation to wash the feet of others sharing quarantine, an Easter Saturday reflection on those whose vigil would be beside hospital beds, and ended with a virtual Paschal Party last Sunday.
Twenty members of the Volunteer Missionary Movement held their annual Easter Retreat – normally located at Buckden Towers - by zoom. The sessions, which included people in France, London, Lancashire, Cheshire, Essex, Surrey and Suffolk, started on Maundy Thursday. With the theme of journeys, each shared a highlight and a difficulty from personal journeys in the past year then prayed for intentions of the world, before reading the Gospel of the last Supper.
The session closed with Pope Francis’s prayer in a time of Coronavirus. “It was a very strengthening and uplifting experience,” said participant Catherine Green. “I felt genuinely sorry for Cardinal Nichols when I heard him on the Today programme on Good Friday morning saying how sad he had been saying mass in an empty Westminster Cathedral on Thursday night."
She hoped “that our priests are able to tap into this marvellous sharing of creative spirituality online”.
On Good Friday participants “attended” different Passion services around the country and some prayed with Cafod’s or Denis McBride’s Stations of the Cross.
On Saturday the focus was on "blessings in our lives" and the hardship of poor communities in the global south were remembered. The group made individual Easter vigils, some blessing fires and water in gardens and studying the vigil readings.
On Sunday morning they met online again to celebrate the resurrection through word and song. According to Catherine Green, “we felt a great sense of gratitude for the strength of our virtual community and the sense of walking together”.
Some HCPT Groups held zoom Easter Sunday services on the day they were due to set off for their annual Easter pilgrimage. A group from Chiswick in West London focused around their Lourdes candle and prayed for four group members who work in the NHS and for all HCPT health workers and carers.
Group members did readings and spoke intentions from their homes which was later described as “very special” and “participatory”. The technology enabled them to pray and sing together.
The HCPT facebook page saw groups participate in a virtual Easter Egg Hunt. An Easter Sunday Mass in Glasgow, celebrated by HCPT’s Trust Chaplain Fr John Carroll, contained favourite HCPT hymns, including Rise and Shine, which helped the more than 5,000 people online join in.
The Tablet has a list of online liturgical, spiritual, arts and other resources, Isolated but not Alone, for help during this time.
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