Saturday reflection: Live from New York

By Colleen Dulle
alumna of Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Charles, Missouri;
assistant producer of audio and video at America

My Midwestern family members and friends keep asking me, with the earnest strain of concern in their voices, “What’s the scene like in New York right now?” Last week, during a Zoom call with my extended family I sat next to my cousin (who lives across the hall from me), and our aunt asked us, “What’s the scene like in New York? Does it look like what we see on TV?” My cousin answered, “Well no, we don’t live in a crowded hospital ward.”

It’s hard for me to say how New York looks right now. Most of what I see every day is the inside of my apartment, and most of my windows look out at brick walls. I suppose I could tell you about having to wait on the sidewalk to get into the grocery store, or the strangeness of seeing my neighbors, who usually take pride in a kind of gritty New York aesthetic, now wearing gloves and surgical masks.

But those kinds of changes are happening everywhere: People are wearing surgical masks all over the world; everyone’s waiting for the grocery store. The real difference, in New York at least, is how it sounds.

I live in a lively Latino and Albanian neighborhood in the Bronx. Most nights, even in winter, there’s not a single empty seat at the sidewalk hookah cafe on the corner. The bars are hopping with college students from the nearby university, and on weekend nights I often fall asleep to thumping beats from a Latin dance joint across the street. People smoke and shout on the sidewalk, there’s one guy who bikes up and down the street doing bird calls (yes, really), and young guys blast Spanish rap out of their souped up muscle cars, driving slowly to show them off.

These days, my block is almost silent. Recording a podcast from home, which was previously impossible because of the noise, is now easy, and at night, it’s paradoxically hard to fall asleep because it’s too quiet. The only sounds are the sirens streaming to and from a hospital half a mile away. Usually I can’t hear them over the noise, but these nights, they echo eerily through the deserted streets.

The one blessed respite in this soundscape are the bells from the church next door, which ring out a few somber notes every hour, breaking through the quiet and the distant sirens. I cherish those bells now; they’re a reminder, every hour, that God is still here.

It’s that dissonant mix of sirens and church bells that stood out to me when I watched a broadcast of Pope Francis giving a special blessing to the world from the steps of St. Peter’s a few weeks ago. I won’t soon forget the image of the pope, hoisting a monstrance above his head, facing an empty St. Peter’s Square as the wind and rain whipped his vestments and the bells of the cathedral clashed with the sirens of Rome, everything echoing through an unrecognizably empty city.

Here in New York, I keep reading about how, at 7 p.m., a roar of applause goes up in Manhattan. Everyone leans out the windows and cheers and bangs pots and pans together; some New Yorkers have even started playing the cowbell. In my part of the Bronx, that doesn’t happen. Here, most people are too busy trying to survive. My neighbors are the folks who are at extreme economic risk should they lose their jobs. Those who are still working, often in the service industry or making deliveries or, God forbid, cleaning the hospitals, face a heightened risk of infection. And if they do get infected, they’re statistically twice as likely to die as Manhattan residents are from coronavirus.

But there is one person in my neighborhood who insists on the nightly applause: the pastor of the church next door, Father Felix. Every night, a few minutes after 8 p.m., he rings the church bells. He knows what the folks here are going through: He’s close with the parishioners, gentle and calm, and they trust him with their problems. It’s hard for him these days, not being able to be with them or offer the sacraments, having to celebrate Mass alone on Facebook Live in the rectory because the WiFi signal won’t reach the church. He wants to show them he cares.

So, every night, he rings the bells: Not just the stoic, automated “bong, bong” that tolls the hour, but the cacophony that comes when you pull with all your weight on the rope in the steeple. The bells fill the neighborhood with sound for several minutes; in my apartment next door, they’re deafening, drowning out the silence and the sirens and the one woman across the street who sometimes leans out the window to clap with me. And the bells deliver the message Father Felix always tries to send: God is with us, no matter what.