Dear Friends,

Despite the continuing gloom from being locked down and at risk of serious illness, today had two bright spots.

The Paycheck Protection Plan that was supposed to offer small businesses loans that became grants when used to help employees, has been fully funded for a second time.  Despite the abuses of the first round - money given to large corporations rather than small businesses and non profits - this round seems as if it will actually help us and our communities.  Never say never, but the public outcry was sufficient that several large firms gave their money back.  Your voice does matter here.

If you have an application in or need to start one, it will be through your bank or (I'm unsure of this, sorry) credit union.  They will have the applications and will walk you through them.  Remember, if the money goes to your employees, the loan converts to a grant. And that is very good news!

Second good bit of news is that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act at this point by authorizing (demanding, but we're being polite) that the federal government pay insurers for the coverage they provided the last few years for people with pre-existing conditions.  The petitioners who wish ACA to die claimed Congress had ended ACA. That is not actually true, and the justices upheld the continued operation of the ACA.  That's particularly good news for states that continued to enroll and support their residents. It means the states, already stressed from covering pandemic costs, will not have to pay insurance companies themselves.

Small steps. But big ones in their way. 

Take heart from success.  It's too easy to miss it these days!

But still - wash your hands.

Peace.

Dear Friends,

In this new Plague Year, we are being confronted with decisions and actions that rarely impact people in civil society.   The hardest burden of fighting this pandemic is falling on every person in the medical community. It is for them we wish today to speak.

In addition to the techniques we all must manage to stay healthy and out of harm's way, our brothers and sisters in the medical community now face, day after day, decisions about who will live, who will die.  This is qualitatively different from the norm.  In our usual life and death encounters in cities and towns, medical personnel rarely have to triage - make instant choices about who is pretty much OK, who desperately needs medical intervention, and who is too grievously hurt for our medical actions to matter.  These are the stuff of rare emergencies such as 9/11.  It is the experience of the battlefield and MASH mobile hospital units.  It's not the experience of urban or rural practitioners, practitioners on reservations,  who are now overwhelmed with patients, many of them desperately ill, but for whom there are far too few treatments.

California Department of Public Health, at the request of hospitals, has created a checklist on standards of care in a world of pain coupled with a shortage of supplies.  Chief on the checklist is "longevity expectation" of the person in question. What this means is that older people, those with pre-existing conditions, those with disabilities, and various others will rate lower on the scale of treatment than will others.  California Church IMPACT, our sister organization that does advocacy, has protested, along with many allies,  the original plan ranking people almost exclusively be age and disability. The protest was entered at 6:00 last night. Some of our concerns were met by 8:30 this morning. But removing life expectancy as a factor was not.  

We know these are harsh conditions. We understand that there are often no good decisions. If you have 20 patients needing ventilators but only 15 ventilators, choices will have to be made.

And here is the moral injury.  There is not a doctor, nurse, anesthesiologist, respiratory therapist or any other provider who was taught to accept allowing someone to die as an answer to a shortage of supplies right here in America. 

We are now asking our medical professionals, the people also risking their own health and safety, to do what they were trained not to do, what society does not want them to do: let people die.

However much we understand the real dilemmas today, when this is over, we are going to have tens of thousands of people who were on the front lines of medical care now suffering from both PTSD and acute moral injury. 

It will be up to us in the faith community to help with the latter.  We should begin now to learn how to intervene, to help, to nurture and treat those who have served us sl valiantly but who were too often forced into choices no human being, much less a trained medical person, should ever have to make. Helping our fellow congregants, our neighbors and friends, cope with their own suffering will be acts of both trained professionals and of us, compassionate allies. and friends.  

There are numerous books on moral injury after war.  While this is in some ways worse since it's actions taken on home ground, the findings may be useful to you. One of them, Soul Repair, by Gabriella Lettini and Rita Nakashima Brock, has set a standard for our future understanding and our work.  Many others exist and may help guide us in our efforts to help make our medical community whole.

We hope we can begin now, even in the midst of the physical crisis, to prepare for the spiritual and soul-devastating impacts being experienced as part of the solutions. 

Thank you.  

Dear Friends,
 
In one small gesture to preserving our faith in this year of the plague, an unidentified church posted a sign outside their brick-and-mortar facility that made me laugh:
 
“The church has left the building”. 
 
The church is, of course, not bound by physical space.  And yet the building and all its functions endures for us as where we gather, in his name, to share our spirituality, our community, our love, and our rituals of belief.  It does matter, not in the short term, perhaps, but in our history and in our future.
 
In this time of pandemic, we are challenged on how to hold our communities together, how to protect our physical congregational resources.  We are using great innovation to pursue our spirituality, but how do we preserve our operations for the future when we can return to “the building”.
 
There are several resources open to congregations to help them weather this storm, bridge that tumult.  So we are offering a list of resources to use as you need them.
 
From our ally in Texas, Texas IMPACT, we bring you assistance for keeping people hired by your church intact.  The Payroll Protection Program (PPP) offer loans that, if used for payroll and other core needs, actually becomes a grant.  This is part of the Small Business Administration (SBA), and you will need to go through your bank to do this.  This provision is part of the CARES Act that Congress passed March 27.  The loan applications are open now. 
 
A sample application may be viewed on the SBA web pages here   

California Nonprofits has good information on their web pages regarding resources that can help here   They can link you to many resources that may be helpful to your operations.
 
Help for those whom you serve   

There is great ambiguity about whether the CARES Act federal funding of $1200 per person will cover the truly indigent.  Some say yes, but without addresses, many will not receive it.  With bank accounts – and those are not impossible for the homeless if the church lets them use the church address – some credit unions allow accounts with photo ID, evidence of an address,  and $1.00 in savings.  That way homeless people can receive direct deposit of the $1200.   Without those resources, it will be very difficult for the truly indigent to get the help to which they are entitled.
 
We are staying abreast of other developments, most in California programs and any expansion of CARES at the federal level, and will try to update you all as things change.
 
We hope these opportunities are helpful for both church in the material sense and churchin the service sense.  We all are stronger if we work together to get ourselves and those we tend through this very hard time. 
 
Blessed be.