From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

As we work on different ways to blend elements of the 9:00am and 11:15am into one service, it’s going to require a willingness to do lots of things that make us uncomfortable. Compromise is one. Experimentation is another.

Taking into account the different ways people experience the Holy in liturgy is not always easy because sometimes we just can’t understand how someone could like x, y, or z, and we assume the way we like something or experience something is the normative experience of the people around us.

Some of this changes with time and perspective. Sometimes we become more aware of the differences around us with experience. Sometimes that experience makes us less willing to countenance the differences!

When I left for seminary, I had spent time at two Episcopal churches.

Trinity on the Green was an old-school, low-church parish in the classic sense of that word.

It meant they did not do communion regularly and you’d never hear talk of people making their confession or the like. The rector said there’d only be incense at Trinity over his dead body. Which led me to ask “so at your funeral we should have it?”

It was a parish that used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and Rite I. When they did celebrate Communion it was done in simple cassock and white surplice with a black scarf, facing the Altar with the people—no Romanizing vestments would be found there!

All was done reverently and formally with four choirs and big processions and the like. So people would sometimes mistake it for a “high church” place if, in their mind, “high church” meant solemnity and a certain English pomp.

The second Episcopal church I had spent time in was Christ Church New Haven.

It is, in many ways, the platonic ideal of a “high church” parish in the Anglo Catholic tradition.

Lots of Latin, lots of incense, lots of vestments, and lots of daily services and rigorous adherence to the liturgical calendar and the calendar of saints. Lots of prayers for the dead and asking for the prayers of Our Lady. These were all things that, at some points in Anglican history, could literally get clergy thrown in prison or worse for engaging in.

Everything was chanted and in traditional language, Rite I or the old Anglican Missal (which actually was the first worship book used here at Saint Philip’s, too, by Fr Ferguson and was considered a sign of a very dubious connection to Rome). Of course the liturgy was entirely celebrated facing the Altar with the people—and done about 1.5 miles from the congregation!

So when I went to seminary I had, in one sense, experienced the breadth of historical Anglicanism from its low church expression at Trinity and its high church expression at Christ Church. Of course, I had only experienced this spectrum on one axis of Anglican identity: a very English, formal, and traditional one. The tensions between those two congregational expressions were sort of like knowing the Whig and Tory positions and debating them in a place where the old, stylized debate rules were still being used.

When I arrived at seminary, for example, I had never heard Rite II—which is the contemporary language rite in the Prayer Book that 90% of Episcopal congregations use regularly. I had not seen, in the Episcopal Church, the Eucharist celebrated facing the people at a free-standing Altar (or Table as it was insistently called at Trinity). That, too, is something of a hallmark of most liturgical communities these days.

My first day in the seminary chapel was literally stunning. I was dumbfounded and called Karrie afterward and said “they’re using some contemporary language that you’d use at a camp or in a rec room!”

My very limited experience told me that what I was seeing and hearing was just wrong. It was not the Episcopal Church. It was profoundly un-Anglican. But of course it wasn’t at all!

But that was what my experience told me. That was my sense of place, of home, in the Episcopal Church and it was being upended. When I realized that kneeling for Communion and, indeed, Communion rails themselves were thought to be too old-fashioned and that bowing at the name of Jesus was retrograde, my sense of place and home was eroded even more.

It was jarring. And it was liberating. I went through a period of real frustration and annoyance. Then I realized I had a choice.

I could belong to the church I imagined or to the Church God had placed me in. I could follow my own spirit’s frustrations or I could ask how the Holy Spirit was moving in this new space and place—and how that same Spirit was challenging me.

I could once again begin the process of spiritual upheaval and transience that had been the course of my spiritual life before or I could let the roots that were growing in the Episcopal Church continue to grow and take me to a deeper place.

I had been called to this Church, at that time, for some reason still unfolding. God would use that discomfort to speak to me about my need to be right, my need to judge, and my need to critique.

God was teaching me to keep looking beyond the comfortable to see him at work in discomfort, too. God was teaching me to hear him speak in places, people, and ways that looked little like my experience told me was just the right way. God was still speaking but I had to lay down my judgment and aggravation to hear.

No doubt, I still have my opinions and my preferences! But I also try to experience whatever God is doing in any given liturgy. How is God speaking in the voice of the choir? How is God speaking in the voices of the noisy kids? How is God speaking in the silence? How is God speaking in the hymns I know so well? How is God speaking in the chant I’m still learning?

The point of the liturgy is not for us to talk at God but for there to be a living and lived exchange of deep calling to deep. From and to our depths the liturgy is moving. We are called to bring all that we have and are and to lay them at the Altar to be transformed by grace.

Sometimes the thing we most need to lay down is our frustrations, judgments, and annoyance. We may find that God is still speaking to us in new ways if we can find joy and wonder in all the ways God speaks to us—and still may yet surprise us.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert