A8 SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020 LATIMES.COM
including houses of worship — has
closed. Many churches, mosques
and synagogues have gone online.
In Louisiana and Ohio,
megachurches have drawn scorn
for meeting. Absent across-the-
board state orders, counties and
cities in Florida have made their
own rules.
Sahdev’s congregation at St.
Philip’s Episcopal Church in Coral
Gables last met at noon on Thurs-
day, March 12. About 20 people
came, many of them retirees. They
asked for God’s mercy. They re-
ceived the Eucharist in their
palms and on their tongues. They
washed their hands and drove
home, not knowing when they’d
see one another again.
The same went for their priest.
At 28, single and on his first job
as an associate rector, Sahdev is
torn between his call to minister in
a time of need and his desire to
stay safe.
“I’m not really worried about
myself,” he said recently, naviga-
ting his Dodge Charger through
the empty street to pick up his last
belongings from the office. “But
what if I am a carrier? I couldn’t
live with myself knowing that one
of my parishioners died.”
In this well-heeled city outside
Miami, where bankers and lawyers
mix with retirees on banyan-tree-
lined streets named after cities
and regions of Spain — St. Philip’s
is on Andalusia Avenue — the
church doors were nearly always
open.
No longer.
“Due to the COVID-19 pan-
demic, St. Philip’s Episcopal
Church and School will be closed
through Friday, March 27,” said a
sign recently taped on the en-
trance.
Days later, it was changed to
Sunday, April 19.
That’s a week after Easter,
when President Trump initially
proposed easing restrictions so
people could worship in “packed
churches.” The president later
pushed the date to the end of April
and predicted “great things”
would happen by June.
Sahdev believed it could be
much longer before life got back to
normal.
“Whenever we actually meet
again,” he said, “that will be our
Easter.”
b
A native South Floridian, he
was born to a Christian mother
and a Sikh father. After dreaming
as a kid of being a defensive end in
the NFL, he felt as a teen that
something was missing and began
going to church. He led the youth
group for the Episcopal Diocese,
which stretches from Key West
north past West Palm Beach,
before attending Episcopal college
in Tennessee and seminary in
Virginia.
But nothing in his seven years
of training prepared him for this.
The nonstop messages from pa-
rishioners and nonparishioners
alike — in text, on Twitter, on
Facebook. The endless group
thread on Snapchat with class-
mates who were now spread
across the country as priests, each
struggling with the same ques-
tions.
He played the roles of friend,
therapist, doctor and minister.
“I need prayers,” a parishioner
recently wrote in a text, complain-
ing that she couldn’t sleep because
of a flaring rash on her legs. “Sorry,
I know it’s weird.... The co-
ronavirus has me feeling all kinds
of ways.”
“You are definitely in my
prayers but don’t you know it’s
probably related to the source of
the stress?” Sahdev replied, allud-
ing to fears of the virus. He told her
to try Tylenol.
In his room, he stacked theolo-
gy books and a chalice box under a
camera stand and ring light that
he faced daily to shoot YouTube
videos. He recently posted a “
minute morning prayer” to “Epis-
copalians on Facebook,” a group
with 34,000 members.
“The church isn’t a building, it
is us,” he said in the clip, telling
viewers to read the Book of Com-
mon Prayer throughout the day. In
another video, he sported his Dan
Marino jersey, explaining the
“faithful moments” of sports to
those who missed live games —
like the Chicago Cubs winning the
World Series after 108 years. “It
kind of reminds us of Moses trying
to enter into the promised land,”
he said, drawing a parallel to the
long wait (unlike the Cubs, Moses
didn’t get in).
In response, churchgoers
flooded Sahdev’s inbox with ques-
tions.
“Did God do this?”
“Is he punishing us?”
“Is it the Chinese?”
He shook his head as he repliedto them.
“God isn’t out here trying to kill
us.”
“Yes, God created us,” he later
said in an interview, looking over
the messages. “But he also gave us
the mind to create medicine, to
have doctors, to have science. We
can pray, and prayer can move
people to take action. But we also
have those tools.”b
The closure of a church means
a lot more than locking the doors
of a building.
At St. Philip’s, where 250 people
gather on Sundays, it meant the
shutdown of its school, leaving
hundreds of kids in online classes
and parents without child care.
It meant no place for the occa-
sional homeless visitor to sit
peacefully under the light of the
stained glass before receiving a
Publix gift card. And it put the
future of the church, which ran on
tuition payments and Sunday
giving, into question.
Sahdev spent nearly a fullpaycheck each month on his $1,
rent. He used the rest of his in-
come on student loans, bills, food
and helping his mother.
With barely any money coming
into the church — and its biggest
day, Easter, canceled — he won-
dered how much longer he’d have a
job.
He was the junior priest, one of
three total, and the first to go if
there were layoffs. But as the only
one who was young and single, he
also felt he had the greatest re-
sponsibility.
“If I can’t help people now, who
of us can?” Sahdev said.
The most important part of
Episcopal worship is the Eucha-
rist. For Catholics, the wafer and
wine transform into the body and
blood of Christ. Episcopalians
instead believe there is a “real
presence” of Christ in them.
Before the church shut its
doors, Sahdev walked next to the
sacristy, opened a small door in
the wall with his sleeve and put his
hand into the tabernacle. He
pulled out consecrated wine and
wafers that were left over from
previous Holy Eucharist services
to take home.
He stored them in his living
room in a closet he converted into
a desk and bookshelf, where gold-
leaf icons of Jesus and Mary sat
next to degrees and a football
signed by Marino, the retired
Miami Dolphins quarterback. On
the closet door hung his golden
robe, the one he planned to wear
for Easter. A large bottle of
Germ-X sat on his ottoman, across
from a small marquee-like sign on
his TV stand. It said, “Bad times
don’t last.”
Sahdev devised a plan. He’d
deliver the consecrated wafers in
Ziploc bags. He’d ask parishioners
to put a table outside their door
with a plate before going back
inside. He’d approach the table,
use purple dish gloves to place the
wafers down, and back away at
least six feet. He’d do the confes-
sion of sins, say the Our Father,
and pray.
His boss — the rector — ad-
vised against it. She questioned if
it would cheapen the experience.She asked whether it was safe. She
wondered whether it would set up
the wrong standard. The Eucha-
rist was always taken to the sick
and immobile. But would healthy
parishioners now ask for commun-
ion delivery when the pandemic
was over?
Still, other churches in the area
were making similar moves.
Sahdev felt his congregation disin-
tegrating.
“If I was a parishioner, and I
didn’t hear or see my church, I’d
feel like it had just abandoned me,”
he said.
His bishop stepped in, banning
priests from going door to door.
After giving it some thought,
Sahdev decided that was the right
call. “I think my rector was wise.”
When the church was open,
Sahdev had keys to go in anytime.
Often, he would sit in a chapel to
the side of the main altar and pray
by himself.
With the church closed, the
closest he could come was to sit on
a bench outside the door, the one
with the COVID-19 sign. He went
there on a recent afternoon, under
the shade of palm trees and the
heat of the slowly setting sun.
He put his head down and
paged through the Book of Com-
mon Prayer, which listed prayers
for healing of the nation and world.
He asked for God’s forgiveness, for
the end to today’s suffering, and to
see his community again.
A voice startled him. About 30
feet away, a parishioner and his
12-year-old son — one off of work,
the other off of school — biked
through the parking lot the church
shares with local tennis courts.
“Father Michael, no loitering!”
the dad joked as he slowed down
and made a small circle.
The priest shot his head up.
“We liked your videos!” the boy
said.
For a few seconds, the three
stared at one another from afar,
awkwardly lingering. At any other
time, they would have walked up
to hug and chat, or to pray. In-
stead, they stood far apart.
Still, it was something for
Sahdev.
He smiled.‘I’m supposed to be there with the people’
[Priest, from A1]
“WHENEVER WEactually meet again,” says the Rev. Michael Sahde of his Florida congregation, “that will be our Easter.”Photographs byPatrick FarrellFor The TimesTHE CHURCHand school are now scheduled to be closed
until April 19. But Sahdev believes it could be much longer.WASHINGTON — The
Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention is now advis-
ing Americans to voluntarily
wear a basic cloth or fabric
face mask when they go out
to help curb the spread of the
new coronavirus.
These non-medical
masks can be either pur-
chased online or simply
made at home, the CDC
says.
After insisting for weeks
that healthy people did not
need to wear masks in most
circumstances, federal
health officials decided to
change their guidance in re-
sponse to a growing body of
evidence that people who do
not appear to be sick are
playing an outsized role in
the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The transmission from
individuals without symp-
toms is playing a more sig-
nificant role in the spread of
the virus than previously
understood,” President
Trump said Friday when an-
nouncing the new advice at a
White House briefing. “So
you don’t seem to have
symptoms and it still gets
transferred.”
He emphasized that
rules on social distancing re-
main in place, and he askedmembers of the public not to
wear medical-grade masks
because those should be re-
served for healthcare work-
ers.
Trump also described
the guidelines as voluntary.
“I don’t think I’m going to
be doing it,” he said.
“I’m feeling good,” he
added when pressed abouthis response. “Sitting in the
Oval Office, behind that
beautiful Resolute Desk, the
great Resolute Desk, as I
greet presidents, prime min-
isters, dictators, kings,
queens — I don’t know,
somehow I don’t see it for
myself. Maybe I’ll change my
mind.”
Surgeon Gen. Jerome
Adams acknowledged that
government advice about
masks has been “confusing
to the American people.”
Until now, the CDC has
said that healthy people do
not need a mask unless they
are working in a healthcare
setting or caring for an in-
fected person. “The best
available evidence” did not
suggest that wearing a mask
would do much to protect a
healthy person from con-
tracting COVID-19, Adams
said.
What changed that
thinking was a recognition
that people were spreading
the virus even when they
seemed healthy.
For instance, a study
published Wednesday in theCDC’s Morbidity and Mor-
tality Weekly Report docu-
mented seven clusters of
COVID-19 cases in Singa-
pore that were fueled by in-
fected people who showed
no signs of illness.
One of those clusters be-
gan with two tourists from
Wuhan, China, who visited a
church when they arrived in
Singapore on Jan. 19 and fell
ill several days later. Three
other people who attended
the same church that day
became sick over the next
four to 15 days.
One of those patients
sat in the same seat as one
of the tourists, according
to closed-circuit camera
footage of the church.
Now that it’s clear
asymptomatic people are
spreading the virus, U.S.
health officials decided ev-
eryone should wear cloth
face coverings in places such
as grocery stores and phar-
macies, Adams said.
The masks will “help peo-
ple who do have the virus
and do not know it” by lim-
iting their ability to transmitit to others, he said.
Adams also advised peo-
ple to make sure their hands
were clean before donning a
mask: “If you choose to wear
a face covering, wash your
hands first.”
The move comes as a
growing number of local and
state agencies are offering
similar guidance.
California officials said
Wednesday that covering
your face could prevent you
from becoming infected with
the new coronavirus or from
spreading it to others. But
they stressed that masks
should not be seen as a sub-
stitute for social distancing,
hand washing and other
safety measures.
Like the CDC, state offi-
cials have said people should
not use medical or surgical
masks, which are desper-
ately needed by medical per-
sonnel.Megerian reported from
Washington, Lin from
Millbrae, Calif., and Money
and Brown from Los
Angeles.In a shift, CDC says people should wear masks
By Chris Megerian,
Rong-Gong Lin II,
Luke Money
and Kailyn Brown
COSTUME DESIGNEREileen DenAdel of Culver
City with face masks she made in the parking lot of
the Costume Designers Guild in Burbank on Friday.Kent NishimuraLos Angeles Times