I understand that a lot of religious people are becoming angry and frustrated at “shelter in place” requirements that appear to preclude their gathering for religious services.

While I’m not religious myself, I have great sympathy for your plight and so have prepared two helpful suggestions to enable you to work around these orders.

1. Zoom meetings! Admittedly this won’t allow you to physically gather. But think of this as a feature, not as a bug. This will make your gatherings more like those in the Afterlife. You won’t be gathering enfleshed in your body there, either!

Of course, there might just be too many of you to make a Zoom meeting practical. Or you might believe that you have to be physically present to take part in some parts of the service. But don’t worry! I have suggestions for you, too.

2. Retrofit your place of worship to include cells and hagioscopes! COVID19 isn’t the first infectious disease to have run rampant through a devout population. (Just like COVID19’s means of infection, God moves in mysterious ways.) And so you’re not the first to have faced the problem of how to social distance while gathering in large groups.

And there’s a solution! Divide your place of worship into small cells, each fitted with a hagioscope. (Basically, a “squint hole” in a divider through which you can observe the service.) This technique was used in medieval Europe to accommodate lepers who wished (or who were required) to attend services and who were thought to be highly contagious.

Of course, this approach might not be perfect. It was also sometimes used to enable cloistered nuns to attend services, but some of those naughty nuns were having nun of this social distancing and had to admonished from slipping outside and “kissing secular persons”–a habit to which they had become “too prone”. So you’d better make sure that your congregation behaves.

Now, you might complain that this advice is wildly impractical–that you can’t possibly retrofit your church in the short period of time you have available. Oh ye of little faith! The Godless Communists of China built two hospitals in a week–and they’re atheists! Imagine what you can do with prayer and the aid of the Creator of the Universe! And don’t forget there’s precedent for religion helping to perform impossible feats of building.

Good bye, Good luck–and God Bless you!