Little Red Church in the Pandemic: Interview with Eugene Loh

During the COVID pandemic, parishioner Karin Forno conducted a series of interviews of St. Mary’s folks. She is publishing them as a series over time on the St. Mary’s website.

October 20, 2020

Interviewer: How has the pandemic affected day to day life for you?

The pandemic has impacted me much less than most people, and a lot of the impact has been positive. I am very much aware of the suffering that many people are going through [ . . .] over two hundred thousand Americans have died and [I am aware of] just how awful a bout with Covid can be. People are losing jobs and housing. I am directly connected with people who, with children, all of a sudden had to move and they did not know to where. And so they moved in with other family and so on. For some people, the psychological effects of isolation have been very difficult.

My situation is different. The last of my children left for college last fall. So I rented out half of the house. There’s a family of four living downstairs. I am upstairs. Then during finals week in spring quarter, one child notified me that he was moving back home the next day. And in the middle of finals week [Monterey County’s shelter in place was announced to take place] at midnight. About an hour later, I got into a car and drove up in the middle of finals week to pick up my daughter and move her back home. We got home at maybe two or three in the morning. And then the third child also came back. So all of a sudden, we were eight people in one house. And so [while] other people were socially isolated. I was the opposite.

Months later, my son traveled for two weeks. When he returned, he quarantined for 14 days. This meant that I gave up my room because it has a bathroom. I took sponge baths. He spent his days working. He would put a plate out on the deck. I would serve food [on] it. We would eat dinner at opposite ends of the deck. [It] was like camping at home in a nice way: we had running water. So it's easy to look at a situation like that and call it a hardship. But I think it's also as easy to look at it as an adventure. And it's not honestly a hardship. And so we just adapt to these things.

I guess probably the first thing that happened in the pandemic was that things at CSC changed a lot. I had been in charge of picking up bread and surplus perishable food from Lucky Supermarket once a week and bringing it to St. Mary's for CSC. All of a sudden, a lot of volunteers could no longer participate because they were elderly retirees who were at risk. The volunteer supply went down. The food bank could no longer pick food up from Lucky. So St. Mary's had not just one pickup a week, but suddenly five pickups a week. I took that on and then found other volunteers. We had pickups from Starbucks also because of changes due to the pandemic. So I coordinated that. I would volunteer at the desk at St. Mary's. We were adapting all the time. All of a sudden there would be a delivery of three huge pallets of food and Sarah would be on the phone making phone calls. So I played a substantially increased role there because of all the changes and my having so much flexibility in my schedule. I've participated a lot in CSC. Fortunately, that subsided. Well, a little bit. At least I'm no longer at St. Mary's more than once a day to deal with CSC stuff. Anyhow, the pandemic meant that my life was really busy.

Another area is Bible studies. We had a small group start up during Easter to study the Book of Acts for six weeks. But it has persisted, and it's actually grown a little bit. It’s a very stable, wonderful group. I attend the lunch time Zoom Bible study on Wednesdays. That is not something I would do except for the fact that it's on Zoom. I can all of a sudden connect, so it doesn't disrupt my workday that much. If it were not for Zoom, I would not be doing that at all.

I also help a lot of non-digital natives with Internet access. There are people at St Mary's who maybe have electronics like iPhones, laptops, telephones, you know, all these sorts of things. But they're not comfortable with Internet access. They're not digital natives. So they need help. And it's typically not that much technical help. The rest of us can connect to Zoom calls, the rest of us can use cell phones. In fact, I don't even have a cell phone. But it's just a matter of being patient with someone and then helping them to negotiate a very new way, for them, of doing things.

I started a YouTube channel for St. Mary's and I thought that was important for a couple of reasons. One was that we were starting to consume a lot more media, but [I thought] we should also be producing it. And also, in a time of physical isolation, it's nice not only to see one another occasionally in little boxes during breakout coffee hour or whatever, but to have the chance to hear somebody talk about something that's important to them.

Very early in the pandemic, people were wondering, will churches be open for Easter? Will we be able to meet in person for Easter? It was ironic to me that people were looking for nostalgia for Easter. They were looking for a return of “what had been.” And yet Easter is supposed to be about resurrection. It's supposed to be about new life. Any sane person would not think of Easter as being a joyous time. A rational person should be frightened of Easter because it's something really new. You've never seen it before. And someone says, oh, it's good, it's resurrection. But that’s not what it's like. The Israelites leaving Egypt, they said, “There weren't enough graves in Egypt to bury us there? We want to go back. We want to go back to slavery.” We don't want to go to this so-called promised land of milk and honey. You know, we want what we know. But that's just so antithetical to Easter. It's antithetical to a lot of things. But we have to keep on moving forward.

Interviewer: Did the initial impact on carbon emissions and that sort of thing surprise you at all? Or could you see that coming a mile off?

I could not see that coming a mile off because it happened rather suddenly. People talked about being able to see across Monterey Bay much better, and that's not even a very polluted part of the world. Other people were giving up their commutes. [ . . . However,] I am not happy about bailing out the airline industry. I think this is an opportunity to downsize a lot of stuff. Let's not support jobs that are not long term sustainable.

Right now, we have the same mentality as when someone gets washed out in a flood zone or gets burned down in some brush area. We pay them to rebuild in the same place. Wait a minute. This may be a chance to do things in a new and better way. I was very pleasantly surprised at first to hear about countries being way ahead with their carbon emission reduction targets all of a sudden during the pandemic, even if for reasons not of their own choosing.

The last few weeks, the air has been really bad due to wildfires. Climate change makes wildfires worse. Fires make climate change worse. We respond to climate change the way we first responded to Covid: we're just so slow to react. We want to hold on to normalcy. We want to hold onto a familiar life. We wait too long to react.

But climate change is going to be this whole thing all over again. It's a much worse threat because it's not going to kill off one percent or whatever of the population, it's going to drive us to extinction, drive millions of species to extinction, drive hundreds of millions of people to migration. So at what point do we learn our lesson and say, “We actually are able to forecast what will happen. So let us take action now. Let us choose to make sacrifices now, rather than wait for worse sacrifices to be forced upon us.”

It's the same thing with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man goes to Sheol and says to Father Abraham, “OK, if you can't dip your finger in cold water to kind of cool my tongue, at least send someone back to Earth to warn my brothers.” And Abraham says, “They have all been warned.” It’s the same thing for us. Why couldn't we have known? Yet we do know about climate change! We've known for decades. We know now.

We knew about the potential for pandemics. A lot of people did. And whether it's flu or different things, we have to be prepared. And nobody really listened to them. They were just off doing their epidemiology and nobody listened to them.