This week we finally screwed ourselves up to trying another church, an Episcopalian church in the wealthy community just south of us (as opposed to the wealthy communities to the east, north and west of us). We left the house late, which could have meant trouble finding parking on the street in front of the church, except that there were only six cars there when we arrived. This was one of those grand old stone buildings with great big central doors, so there was no sneaking in. Once inside we were relieved to find maybe sixty or seventy people scattered throughout the pews, meaning there must have been a parking lot in back.
We took a seat not too far back and tried to catch up to the service. This proved no simple task since following a high church service can be like navigating a website in which all the linked pages open at once and you have to make the links yourself and you only have so much time because you’re supposed to keep up with a whole roomful of users. The main page directs you to this colored page here of this card over there or this book back here, but then you’re also supposed to stand or kneel or sit while you’re filing through all this paperwork, and sometimes you read or sing but sometimes you don’t and you kind of have to know which comes when.
In all actuality I find the high church service more meaningful as I get older. In fact, I’m pretty sure they are just the space for the meeting of God and man that many Evangelical churches consciously exclude. Liturgy is only ‘mere’ ritual for those who watch church like a TV show. Otherwise it invites one to participate in the communal activity of worship that church is meant to be, it binds one not only to that specific congregation but to all congregations who share that liturgy. Furthermore the parts of the liturgy each move one through a series of ritual modes such as confession/repentance, meditation, praise, reverence. The exteriority of the ritual means these modes are not moods, that is, not just emotional experiences that come and go. Rather, they are activities, the obedient service of the individual-in-community-before-God. Heavy.
The interim rector gave a well-crafted sermon which included some sort of connection between the Angel of Death and hitting a deer with your car, made references to Christmas, Jonathan Edwards, and the Puritans, and apparently slipped in somewhere a conclusion to be drawn from it all, which I’m afraid was beyond me. But he had a very fine, bellowing voice. We opted against going up for the Eucharist, which may have been a mistake. My old feeling was that it is a ritual of remembrance for a church body; hence it wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate to go up as a mere visitor. But now I see it as a ritual of remembrance for the church body, for the global congregation of Christ’s children. As such, we should feel free to partake in any particular congregation that invites us to it.
During the passing of the peace only the a couple people gave us the “vulture eyes,” those overly-eager, widening pupils that see in the newcomer hope for their struggling church. Relax, people. We are not your saviors. But by and large they were genial, perhaps even a little reserved. We were invited to the coffee hour, where we would no doubt learn a great deal more about them, but we weren’t quite up to it this week; we’d had to meet new people already at two separate family Thanksgivings, and were feeling greeted-out.
Going into Advent as we are, we think we’ll keep trying high church services, perhaps even return to this one. We didn’t come back with particularly powerful feelings about it, but that in itself may be a reason to return.
