Write an essay explaining where you find your spiritual home and why.
Christy wrote about her spiritual home in nature, here. In her post, here, Carol explores being a spiritual nomad.
My first job out of college was as a Chaplain's Assistant in the campus ministry program at Whitworth College in 1976-77. I had graduated with a double major in English and history and, at that time, I gave serious thought to applying to a seminary and possibly working toward ordination.
For a short period of time during the 76-77 school year at Whitworth, a handful of us tried to get a group together to discuss the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. As a student of literature and history, I loved the spirit in human beings that manifests itself in creativity, imagination, compassion, ingenuity, and love, to name a few of its fruits.
Please forgive me when you read what's next if you are theologically fluent. I'm not.
I wanted this group to get together because I so deeply admired the human spirit, had been so moved by studying Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, Rembrandt, and other visionary artists, and had been so deeply impressed with the spirit of great leaders and innovators I'd studied in history, that I wanted to talk with others and learn more about the work of the Holy Spirit. My understanding of certain passages in the New Testament was that the Holy Spirit joined forces with the human spirit, but I wasn't quite sure I understood this wedding of the two or why, when the human spirit moved people to create such sublime art and to envision such incredible ways of improving the human condition, the human spirit (I'm searching for the right word here) needed the Holy Spirit.
(By the way, I've heard what I'd call the textbook answer to my question about the human and Holy Spirit countless times and almost every time I've heard it explained, the person saying it didn't seem to be speaking her words or his words, but words that were, to me, pat answers, received doctrine, the language of rightness and officialdom. I want to understand this on my own terms and speak my own language. I'm not quite there yet!)
Well, that human spirit/Holy Spirit group never launched. We tried. But, alas, it fizzled out.
But my search for a spiritual home was underway. I didn't quite know if the home I wanted even existed. I wanted a place to worship and a place for fellowship where I could experience the vitality of both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.
What I didn't know, was that I longed to worship inside a poem; I longed to be an actor in a play. I wanted to worship in a setting that was alive with what I loved: metaphor and drama mixed with an embrace of mystery even while maintaining a devotion to human reason.
I couldn't have said this back in 1979 when I first started attending services at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, but now I know that what I love about poetry is the way it gives structure to emotional experience. Poems distill feeling. Poems give us a concentrated experience with feeling and emotion that the messiness of day to day life can't give us. Poems enhance the power of feeling through the rhythm of language, by giving special stress to certain feelings through words that rhyme or have the same vowel and consonant sounds or by where the word is placed in a line or as the reader moves from one line to the next.
I know now that the liturgy of the Episcopal Church is a poem for me. It's a creation of the coupling of the human spirit and the Holy Spirit and the liturgy structures my spiritual experience, giving special emphasis to certain dimensions of my spiritual life as we move from one part of the liturgy to the next.
The liturgy is deeply biblical. Much of the liturgy comes directly from scripture and every Episcopalian service features four readings: a reading from the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. The Old Testament), a Psalm, a reading from the Epistles, and the climactic reading from one of the Gospels.
The reading selections are governed by a liturgical calendar and I know that I am joining other Episcopalians near and far in hearing the same Scripture read Sunday after Sunday. My sense of being a member (and here comes a metaphor!) of the Body of Christ is deepened every Sunday by knowing that so many worshipers are all immersed in the same words and the same Scripture, uniting us all in a common experience.
And then, every time I worship, I get to be in a play. I physically participate in Christ's death and resurrection by walking to the front of the church, kneeling, and ingesting (here comes another metaphor!) the body and blood of Christ by way of the elements of communion. It's akin to a mythical journey of leaving home, entering into a realm of mystery, and then returning home again, emboldened with deeper knowledge and experience -- the pew is like my home; in the elements I ingest the mystery of life coming from death; and then I return, deepened, home again to my seat.
For me the poetic and theatrical experience of the liturgy, of celebrating the Eucharist, gives me a more memorable and enduring experience with the Holy Spirit than what I experienced at churches where the center of the service was the sermon. I'm all for sermons. I've heard many stirring sermons in Episcopal churches -- in Eugene, Spokane, Portland, Cottage Grove, Coeur d'Alene, San Francisco, Washington D. C., Beltsville, College Park, Bethesda, Dunn Loring, and elsewhere. But, the center of every one of those Episcopal services was the liturgical word leading us to the Communion.
I am happy and, in many ways, relieved that in God's house there are many rooms (another metaphor!). I'm very happy God's house has a small room called the Episcopal room. It's not very popular. Many other rooms are more exciting. Sometimes I can hear fellow Christians in those other rooms. I hear electric guitars and drum sets playing; I hear loud Hallelujahs; sometimes I hear ecstatic utterances, brothers and sisters speaking in tongues. Many of those other rooms have projectors and screens with words to songs and inspirational images on them. At least the Episcopal room has wi-fi!
I think I came knocking at the door of the Episcopal room because I'm not much of a believer. (Give me a second here.) Every Sunday, I join the others in the congregation and recite the Nicene Creed. Within myself (or at a whisper), I substitute the word "believe" with the word "experience". For me, it's like gravity. I don't believe in gravity. Gravity just is. I experience it all the time. I don't have to ask myself if I believe in gravity or not. It's the same with the Trinity. I experience God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all the time, rarely in extraordinary ways, but all the time. Every day, I witness death coming to life again, whether it's some part of my person that had died and now is alive again, whether it's the leaves coming back on the trees in the spring, or whether I witness a comeback by someone in sports or entertainment or I see dead parts of Kellogg coming back to life. Daily, I experience resurrection. I don't really think to believe in it. It just is.
It's why my spiritual home away from the Episcopal Church is definitely the world of nature. But, explaining that will have to happen in another blog post. It's the Episcopal Church that's most on my mind today. For me, it's a church that blends the human and the Divine just right as it looks to scripture, tradition, and reason as its three sources of authority, all interacting with the others, critiquing one another as well as upholding each other. It's what's commonly called the three-legged stool. Remove or overemphasize one of the legs, and, like a stool, things are off balance, out of whack.
In many ways, my experience studying English and history at Whitworth was an Episcopalian experience. In searching for truth in my studies, the traditions of history, the clarity of reason, and the power and beauty of scripture were always at hand, and, as it turns out, were leading me to what has become my spiritual home.
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