What I miss most about going to church is the choir. During this long year of pandemic, when I only entered our parish building twice, that’s the piece of liturgy I wished most to restore to my Sundays.

That’s not a very pious thing to say, but I’m not a pious person. I know the right answer should be that I missed the sacrament, the true presence of Christ under the forms of bread and wine, the paschal mystery delivered concretely like a fragment of heaven into my hand. At the least, I should say I missed listening to my pastor’s homilies or seeing the faces of friends in the assembly who compose the visible expression of church on Earth to me.