Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

Whew. Another academic year, Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha have come and gone. It’s not exactly the most convenient thing for me, in my various modalities, to have the end of spring semester and the Paschal season line up the way they do, but there we go. I better learn to live with it. It was made more complicated this time around by getting really sick Monday of Holy Week, having to muscle through, collapsing after the lamb roast Sunday, and finally crawling out of bed to go to the doctor the following Friday. Even now, a good two weeks after the Z-Pak, I’m still somewhat on the mend. The month of May is going to be largely a hodgepodge of exam reading, baby prep, and Dumbarton Oaks prep, so I’m not sure it’s really going to be any less stressful, but there we go.

So, where were we… I guess I had made an attempt at the end of my senior year to go back to the expression of Christianity proper to my Danish heritage, and then I graduated high school.

The summer after graduation was stressful and complicated. My parents’ move had left me without any real place I belonged; they wanted me in Anchorage with them for the summer, which isn’t really where I wanted to be. The details of that part of the story will have to be left for the next addendum, but the short version is that between going back and forth a bit between Alaska and Seattle, navigating various issues on how I’d actually start my freshman year at Western Washington University, and, well, starting my freshman year, whatever spiritual momentum I may have gained from my attendance at Northlake Lutheran completely dissipated. I was able to visit there once over the summer during one of the trips to Seattle, and talked to Pastor Chris about what was going on. “Well, we’re praying for you,” he said.

When I got to Bellingham, I had absolutely no idea what do in terms of churches. I was limited to my on-foot options, which weren’t fantastic. My evangelical friends were super-involved in The INN University Ministries, and I went once, but it was everything that had made me uncomfortable about Overlake’s high school group turned up to 11, with what struck me as a baffling appropriation of youth culture. (Keep in mind I felt this way and was articulating it more or less with these words at 17.) Why, oh why, would you use the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms” in the context of Christian worship? Was it supposed to make me want to sing along? Well, it didn’t, it made me look for the nearest door. Call me a grumpy old man beyond my years (and I’m sure some of my friends did), but I could only read it as pandering. I didn’t want to be pandered to, and as a teenager I really didn’t want to be pandered to as part of an interest group called “teenagers”. I wanted to be part of something that would transcend whatever concerns and tastes informed my latest mix tape, and I didn’t (and don’t) understand why that premise appeared to be overlooked at best and treated with hostility at worst. I joined a “care group” (now apparently called “small groups”) that was led by one of my INN friends who was a fellow voice major and former Dennis Kruse student, but beyond that I felt like there wasn’t a spiritual home for me in Bellingham. One aspect of this that perhaps might be predictable is that the more I was exposed to the masterpieces of sacred music as a singer in training, the more my discomfort with modern praise music was amplified.

I remember having a conversation with the same friend who had told me that I didn’t belong at Overlake. He was easily the best friend I had in those years (which is part of why I had to take his conclusion that I just didn’t fit in there so seriously, and why it kind of stung), he also wound up at Western, and he was heavily involved in the INN. He provided continuity for me that was vital, and we talked about a lot of the Big Things in those early college days. I was talking to him about lacking any kind of a spiritual home — not a new conversation topic between the two of us, obviously — and he, as per usual, didn’t understand why I couldn’t just adapt to Protestant America’s cultural norms. For him, there was a fundamental assumption that that’s what “real Christianity” looked like for most normal people, so what made me so special that I couldn’t deal with it? My points about transcendence didn’t make any sense to him. “Why?” he said, when I explained to him that some kind of historically-rooted practice of music and worship seemed important. Because otherwise it’s no bigger than we are, I said. “Yes, but why is that important?” he insisted. Everything about his evangelical milieu that made me felt like an outsider was precisely what made it authentic, normative Christianity for him, and what my instincts were telling me to look for came across to my friend as no more than question begging from somebody who just didn’t want to deal with what Christianity actually is.

I should point out that there was an emphasis at both Overlake and at the INN on being nonsectarian. It became clear to me that “nonsectarian” usually manifested itself practically as a lowest common denominator form of worship, a reluctance to talk about theological detail (and yet a base assumption of some form of Reformed Christianity that was probably more anti-Catholic than anything), and occasionally, if pressed, some discussion of what each denomination got wrong from the “nonsectarian” viewpoint. In other words, it really took on its own forms, values, and dogma, becoming a “sect” or “denomination” in its own way. My friend’s responses in some of these conversations maybe make more sense from that perspective; the things I was concerned with were generally products of one “sect” or another (liturgical practice, musical traditions, historical expressions, etc.), and since really they were all more or less problematic, why not just flow with whatever cultural tide is coming in, particularly when it’s going to be a lot easier to reach people that way anyway?

Between the personal crisis that I was dealing with my freshman year (basically the culmination of much of what had been going on in my family since 1986/1987, brought to a head by the fact that we were now geographically separated) and my inability to find a church home under the circumstances that was anything like Northlake, my renewed sense of loss of place put me pretty much back where I had been throughout much of junior high and high school. Someone who self-identified as a Christian but who had no Christianity to identify with.

I must compress some events here, simply because there is about a 14 month period between major developments in which essentially nothing of any importance occurred. In the spring of 1995, I got a phone call from one Vernon Greenstreet, the organist and choir director at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. His usual tenor section leader had a conflict on Pentecost Sunday; might I be able to fill in at the rehearsal and the service for $40?

So, here was my first exposure to multiple ideas — one, that a church in the present day might actually have an “organist and choir director”. Two, that somebody might be paid for singing in church. Three, that there was such a thing called “Pentecost Sunday”. Four, that there might be a set of circumstances in which it would not only be appropriate for somebody like me to sing in church, but I’d even feel comfortable doing it. It was also my first time ever darkening the door of an Episcopal Church; I knew absolutely nothing about it, except that a Roman Catholic friend of mine in high school had once jokingly called it “Catholic Lite — all the salvation and none of the confession”, and I had no idea what to expect.

But the salient point for this young tenor finishing their freshman year of college was that somebody was offering me money to sing, the very first time anybody had ever done so. I said yes, of course, while indicating I would need a ride to rehearsal and to the service (St. Paul’s was too far away from campus to realistically walk). No problem, Vern said.

Sunday morning I was picked up by future Metropolitan Opera baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, who was singing the solo for C. Alexander Peloquin’s “Psalm for Pentecost” (ah, whole tone scales…) (which was also my first, and by no means last, exposure to the repertoire published by GIA). The whole morning was a little surreal; St. Paul’s is (was? I haven’t been there in over 10 years) a big, beautiful, old-style brick church with thick carpet, high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, rood screen, stations of the cross, lady altar, chancel with choir stalls, and high altar. It represented a number of firsts for me; first time in a choir robe, first time processing, first time in a choir stall, and so on. The liturgy seemed reasonably similar to the Lutheran service at Northlake, so it was familiar in broad strokes, but the physical setting and the way it was celebrated suggested something with deeper roots. And by contrast to alt-pop songs being appropriated by a worship band, Peloquin seemed to at least strive for a certain standard of English language liturgical beauty.

But, fascinating as all that was, I was more interested in finding out if they could pay me to sing a bit more often. Well, no, not right now, Vern told me, but I’ll keep you on the list of alternates. (By the way, he said, I already paid my normal section leader for this month, so you’ll be getting a check from him. I did, in fact — and it bounced. Ah well.)

Skip ahead to summer 1996. The 1995-96 school year had gone by with a phone call or two from Vern, but we were never able to quite make all the connections work, and for a number of reasons that I’ll explain later, I found myself in Anchorage with my parents a full three weeks before the school year was over.

One day in July, an item in the Anchorage Daily News caught my eye, something about a controversial bishop whom I had never heard of before named John Shelby Spong doing a series of lectures in Anchorage on a book tour. I think I still have the clipping somewhere; humorously enough, on the other side is a story about a brand new invention that will change everything called a “cable modem”. If I can find it I’ll scan it and post it. Anyway, Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of the diocese of Newark, and all I knew of the Episcopal Church at that point was that one Pentecost service fourteen months previous, I knew nothing of the office of a bishop, I knew nothing of the details of what he preached, but reading the article I found out that there was somebody, a Christian leader, who took even less of the Bible literally than I did, and who said that in and of itself, that wasn’t a bad thing. I read Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism and Living In Sin?, and while I certainly didn’t buy everything he had to sell, I still found a fundamental point very important—that there could be differences of opinion on some things without it necessarily making somebody a non-Christian. At that point, anyway, that was a message I needed to hear. I went to his lectures while he was in town, and I got to chat with him a little bit. I found the lectures fascinating and him quite congenial; again, I didn’t believe everything he had to say, but it marked the first time I had ever heard somebody even try to put Scripture in context as a way of illuminating its meaning. Such things simply were not done in my experience up to that point.

When I returned to Bellingham that fall, I received a phone call from Vernon Greenstreet, who wanted to bring me in as the regular tenor section leader/soloist. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church thus became my de facto church home. I became friends with the associate organist, who had in a previous mode of existence — so to speak — been an Anglican monk, and expounded at great lengths about Anglican heritage and practice. I was painted a picture of a Christian heritage that kept its connection to history and Catholic identity while not requiring one to swallow the specificity of Roman Catholicism’s claims or to check one’s brain at the door. In this setting, I heard the words “Sacraments” and “Real Presence” and “Tradition” for the first time, as well as the notion that liturgy was an expression of belief, not an impediment to it — lex orandi, lex credendi, in other words. The real catechism, however, was from the chancel, where I quite literally had a front row seat for much of what appeared to give the liturgy and Sacraments depth, even in the context of watered-down Rite II. It’s amazing how much gravitas a rood screen, choir stalls, and pipe organ seem to provide. (Ah, but they stopped short of incense; the thurible was treated as an unwelcome relic of the past, to be brought out only at moments of absolute necessity and then to be employed with maximum economy and at least a week’s warning.) The whole picture seemed to bring alive, at least in some way, five hundred years’ worth of Christian history.

The priest, Fr. John Gibbs, came across as a kind, orthodox, welcoming man who wanted to cultivate where my interests seemed to lie, not chase me away because I didn’t think that it was necessary to believe in young earth creationism or think Bill Clinton was the antichrist. (I have since heard stories that lead me to believe that perhaps he was not as orthodox as he seemed; hard to say.) And, well, if Vern wasn’t exactly the high church true believer that my organist friend would have preferred, being there was a godsend in every respect (including being paid to be there, I must admit — making close to $400 for Holy Week, recompense that has yet to be matched in any other setting, was very much appreciated).

In any event, it was clear to me that God was there, and that that was where God wanted me at that point. When the words “Confirmation class” were uttered, I signed up (although for all practical purposes my organist friend was in charge of catechizing me, since the class was the same night as choir rehearsal). On 29 June 1997, at the age of 20, I was confirmed by Bp. Vincent Warner of the Diocese of Olympia, and got to sing L. J. White’s “A Prayer of Richard of Chichester” (the standard text of which, I am obliged to add, does not include the phrase “Day by day”, no matter what Stephen Schwartz wants to tell you) a duet with flute for the service. Alas, no family or friends came to my Confirmation; nobody who was around understood what was going on or what I was doing. My mother (who was in Alaska anyway) insisted that I had been raised as a fundamentalist Protestant; what did the seven sacraments or the three legged stool (for the uninformed — Scripture, Tradition, and Reason) have to do with Jesus? The girl I was with at the time identified as a pagan and wanted nothing to do with it. My INN friends most certainly didn’t get it (even though it was entirely consistent with everything I had been telling them for years). My organist friend had disappeared in the spring under what I will describe only as unpleasant circumstances, and I never saw him again.

One very interesting outcome of my taking the road to Canterbury that I didn’t even notice until much later was that it represented the first intermingling of my spiritual life with my professional aspirations. There would have been no place for the kind of singer I was in a setting like Overlake, but at St. Paul’s I started to think of myself as a “church musician”.

Naturally, as I settled in at St. Paul’s, other complex matters arose that made my post-confirmation time there necessarily short-lived.

More to come. Sorry about that.