For Valentine’s Day this year, in the innocent days before we’d even started thinking much about the word “coronavirus,” the two of us went to the St. Louis Art Museum to see their exhibit on Jean-Francois Millet. The highlight of the show was Millet’s “Angelus,” painted in the late 1850s, which depicts a peasant farmer couple pausing their labors to pray the Angelus prayer at the end of a long day in the fields. We spent a long time looking at the work, and as we left talked about what it must have been like for these two poor farmers to drop their tines and basket of potatoes, bow their heads, and lift their hearts in prayer each day when the bells rang out from the church on the horizon. We wondered what challenges they may have been facing and what conversations they were having with God in those quiet moments.
Fast forward two months: the seeds of the coronavirus were starting to thrust roots into our daily routine. Our normally packed schedules came to a shuddering halt, and most of our busy social obligations withered away. God, however, took this tumult as an opportunity when Fr. Peter invited us to join his family for their nightly Compline prayer via Zoom. Since then, we’ve tuned in most evenings at 8 PM to join our church family in praying for peace and comfort amidst the upheaval that 2020 has brought. We start each night by “quieting our hearts before the Lord” as Lucy usually tells us. So we pause, drop our metaphorical basket of potatoes, and we pray. We take up the easy yoke that Jesus promises us in quite the same way the peasant farmers did so long ago. And no matter where we are, whether in the fields harvesting crops, or in front of our video camera on our couches, we are praying to the same God. The same God that was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. We are connected. I’m not sure we have felt more connected than we do now as we have gotten to know people from across the parish, some of whom are spread across the country that we wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise. We feel a part of the wider assembly of Saints as we share the words passed down through the ages; maybe even prayers that 19
th
century French peasants would have prayed. “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep…” Prayer from Compline, BCP 134
–Christopher and Mary Katherine
