St. Lydia’s first service took place in the season of Advent. The word comes from the Latin adventus, which means “arrival,” or even “ripening.” The season is all about gestation. We are watching and waiting for God to be born from the watery universe of a girl named Mary.
* * *
Another memory.
I was seven or eight years old, still small enough that my feet dangled above the floor in the church pew where I sat. My parents had bundled me into the car on a cold New England night, sidewalks crusted with a season of snow, and driven me to church. It was strange to be there in the sanctuary on a weeknight instead of on Sunday morning. I understood we were there for a special service in a time called “Holy Week,” when you go to church a lot before finally getting an Easter basket on Sunday.
Most Sunday mornings, our worship was mundane and comforting. The priest would stretch out his arms; I thought his chasuble made him look like a great flying bat. He would turn his face upward and break the wafer with a loud crack.
“Holy food for holy people,” he’d say.
I learned to cross myself and cup my hands in front of me at the altar, expectant and waiting. I made a game of letting the wafer sit on my tongue for as long as possible before it dissolved into mush, or the fiery taste of the wine washed it away.
This night, however, the church was shadowy instead of bright. The story being told seemed like something I shouldn’t be allowed to listen to—Jesus flogged and mocked and tortured—and yet there I was, listening. At the end of the service, a grown-up came and used the brass candle snuffer I’d been taught to use as an acolyte (just let it hover—you don’t have to smush it into the wax) to put out the candles one by one. Only the service wasn’t over. When all the candles were out, the ladies of the Altar Guild came and began to remove everything from the altar. The Bible was carried away and the cloths carefully folded, exposing the spindly legs of the wooden tables. Now they seemed naked, as if their table-knees might knock together.
The priest took off his embroidered chasuble, then hoisted up his white robe. He held a bucket and the palm fronds from earlier that week, when the whole congregation shouted “Hosanna.” Descending to his knees with the palms in his hands, he dipped them in the water and began to wash the steps in front of the altar. The church looked bare and empty. There was only the sound of the fronds scraping against marble. The priest scrubbed and scrubbed, as if he was determined to wash away years of grime, kneeling like a peasant.
The ritual felt dark and true.
* * *
—
I became entranced with mystery, the strangeness of these rites we carried out: eating Jesus’ body, or marking ourselves with ash. I was mesmerized by the language of symbol. The idea that there are words too deep to be spoken—messages too rich or layered or complex to simply say out loud. At home my mother read to me of Aslan, how he was slain on the stone table and how it cracked in two. Little girls like me, Lucy and Susan, came to attend to the great lion’s body, unknotting the ropes around his enormous padded paws and weeping. It sounded like another story I’d heard.
Meanwhile, a certain yearning silence had taken up residence at our house on Ward Street, where a small, square, stained-glass window stood watch over the wooden staircase. My fourteen-year-old sister had left our working-class Connecticut town to live with her dad across the country in California. The grief of her absence sent us each to our own corner of the house. A square meal (meat, peas, baked potato) was still on the table every evening, and CNN still clicked on once the dishes were in the sink. We all sat around one table, yet I felt as if we were each in our own small wooden boat, drifting away from one another, on a dark sea.
Unspoken questions were tucked into bed with me between the crisp cotton sheets each night. Is there more? And what do we call it? Will Aslan come and carry me away? Will my family ever find each other again? In the dark I pulled my knees beneath my chin and imagined I was curled close into the lion’s body, rising and falling on his breath, his large feline purr like a steady engine.
* * *
—
When I was a knock-kneed twelve-year-old, my family moved across the country to Seattle. There we attended a hulking cinder-block cathedral perched on an overhang, looming above the city. The choir wove fugal voices through the capacious sanctuary, pure and clean, the harmonies winding around each other.
Faith was about beauty; God was a presence that waited just out of sight. No one taught me that if I just prayed harder God would give me a boyfriend, or if I didn’t get the role I wanted in the school play, I must have sinned. No one told me to “invite Jesus into my heart.” The God I encountered in the cavern of that cathedral lay hidden and waiting in the folds of our existence, revealed in moments of unpredictable transcendence.
In the stark cathedral, I could detect God’s beating heart, pulsing beneath our rituals. It was not always easy to locate. We stood and sat down again, kneeled to pray and crossed ourselves. It was rote, except for when it wasn’t, moments when my breath would catch. It happened when we moved up the aisle to receive communion: a procession of mismatched saints standing around the great stone altar, our hands outstretched and waiting. It happened sometimes when we sang together from the pages of the hymnal, blue bindings loose with years of use. Once in a rare while, I looked over to see that my mother was weeping.
There was so much beauty and grace. But sometimes I felt a distance between our rituals and that beating heart of God. The acolyte master instructed us kids to light the altar candles with a military precision that made me jumpy, as if bowing on the wrong step on the way to the altar would render the Eucharist invalid. The candles, the flowers, and the communion ware had to be perfect.
Church folk can focus on ritual so much that we lose track of God. We become entranced with a palimpsest: layers upon layers of thin paper written and rewritten over centuries. We are transfixed by the scribblings of aeons of traditions; the archives of how we’ve always done it. Yet God’s heart is alive, and therefore unpredictable, impossible to manage or constrain with writings or rules. Sometimes it frightens us, and so we try to tame God into something more manageable—something we can control.
After church on Sundays my parents and I would go out for lunch on Capitol Hill, passing street kids sitting on blankets begging for change, their crumpled paper cups set before them. The kids had coal liner smudged around their eyes, pierced faces, hair sharpened into points. Next to them lay panting pit bulls with chain collars around their necks.
At church, we had just celebrated a meal where everyone, the priest said, was welcome at the table. And now, as my parents and I sat down for lunch, kids just a little older than me were sitting hungry. Twelve-year-olds are literal creatures with noses for hypocrisy. Wouldn’t Jesus have invited them in for lunch? We claimed that communion would feed the hungry, but only broke a thin wafer. What would happen, I wondered, if we actually did what we said we were doing?
* * *
My first year in New York City, I am a year out of divinity school with my first real job. All my worldly possessions have been jigsawed into a U-Haul and carted up the stairs to my minuscule studio apartment. Every outing requires I study the subway map. This is where St. Lydia’s begins to thread itself into being.
There are preliminary rhythms and routines: the three-stop commute to the towering sanctuary where I work as part of a large staff, planning worship services. Rehearsals with a college friend who’s asked me to write music for her dance piece. Twin Peaks viewing parties every Sunday night at the apartment of my high school friend Heather. Life is a rough sketch of something that might be. My friendships are just filaments. I am always the new addition to a cluster of people who already know each other. I stand, smiling blankly as they share office gossip I’m not in on. Nothing feels as if it belongs to me.
My real life takes place across the teleph
one lines. A few times a week there’s a long phone call to Rachel in Chicago, who details the latest bitchy behavior of her art school associates and plans for her final sculpture show. Rachel and I attended college together, and later both landed at Yale Divinity School, where we were roommates for a year, tucked on the second floor of a house with a screened-in porch on Canner Street. She’d enrolled there in an effort to please her parents, studying illuminated manuscripts instead of carving linocuts herself. But her energy seemed misplaced. She was often scheming up some complicated art project, like an addict craving a fix, furtively gathering supplies in her bedroom.
Rachel possessed a disarming sincerity that converted new acquaintances into best friends in the time it took to walk from the library to the refectory. She had this voluptuous, wide smile and bright brown eyes that everyone—men, women, it didn’t matter—wanted to get lost in. Her charm gave way to depth; she was a clear spring with no bottom.
She could convince me to invite everyone we knew over on a Tuesday when I had a midterm the next morning because there was a guy she liked who would probably come if we invited everyone. The next morning, hungover and scrawling out an essay on Tertullian, I wondered how I had let her talk me into it. Rachel was a little bit like a magic spell. You wanted the magic, and when it was gone, you were bereft.
Rachel never felt at home at divinity school.
“I’m an artist,” she finally confessed to her parents.
“We know,” they said. And off she flew to Chicago to disappear into her studio for days, carving linocuts, her thick brown hair tied back in a knot, fingers bruised with ink, no conception of time and no exegesis papers in sight.
* * *
—
Rachel’s voice is home, familiar and true as a song, while New York is still just clatter and noises. I’ve also carried heartbreak to this city. Before packing my things into boxes and loading everything into a U-Haul bound for Manhattan, I broke up with the guy I’d thought I would marry. We’re still in touch. Sometimes I call him and am startled by the familiarity of his voice when he answers, as if the sound is etched in my bones.
Over the phone, I explain to Rachel that my heart is aching for him, that I feel like we might make our way back to each other when the time is right.
“Emily,” she says, stopping me. “I think he’s moving on.”
I start taking long walks at night. Without many friends, I can’t think of much else to do with myself. One hot summer Saturday evening I head down Broadway past sidewalk cafés full of people whose lives seem to brim with coherence. They laugh and lift cocktail glasses studded with mint leaves or orange peels. Sitting on the ledge of the Lincoln Center fountain, I watch the jets of water move through their cycles.
At 10:00 P.M. the doors of the opera house are pushed open, and I am engulfed in a wave of operagoers, streaming past in tuxedos and silk wraps, sparkling and festooned, discussing the evening’s most impressive aria. I am twenty-seven. Other people my age are going on dates or clambering down concrete stairs to shoe-box theaters. I’m sitting self-consciously on the edge of a fountain, hoping no one notices how alone I am.
* * *
—
I plunge forward, trying to create a new life. I take the subway unreasonably long distances, walking past bodegas and under highway overpasses to arrive at theater performances of people I kind of knew in college. Say hi and make small talk before I disappear through the exit without saying goodbye.
Despite my early departures, I meet a decent sampling of young New Yorkers and hear about their lives and work. Inevitably, in the course of our conversations, the question comes: What do you do?
“I work at a church,” I say, referring to the position that brought me to New York. This is never a pleasant moment. Admitting religious affiliation in a city as secular as New York is like confessing to a judgmental stranger you attend medieval fayres in full costume or attend square-dancing competitions on the weekend, but so much worse. It renders you hugely nerdy, entirely undatable, possibly delusional, and likely not terribly smart, all in one blow. Often my conversation partner furrows her brow and recoils. Other times, she leans in, and I know I’ve met a fellow delusional.
“Really?” she says, her eyebrows raised. “I feel like I’ve been looking for something…”
In a city of eight and half million people, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s lonely.
While we’re standing at the bar waiting to order our drinks, the young woman tells me how much she misses her church back home.
“It was pretty conservative,” she says, shrugging. “But everyone knew me there. It was just nice to have a place to, you know, ask those questions. About what life means. Or think about what I’m supposed to do with my life.” She reaches for her thick pile of red hair and draws it around one shoulder. “I tried a couple of churches here, but they’re all so big! And so formal. Everyone’s dressed up and then, well, I’m single. I don’t have kids or anything. I went to coffee hour and they were really nice and said hello, but…”
She trails off. Then she pins her eyes on me and says, “I have faith. But I don’t know where to put it in this city.”
I nod. I understand.
“Maybe I could come to your church sometime,” she says. But both of us know it wouldn’t be quite right. The church where I work is like the ones she’s tried: all gray stone and steeple and unmovable wooden doors.
This conversation keeps happening. I keep meeting people who are “looking for something.” After a while, I find I am carrying another question with me: What would a church for these people look like?
It felt like I couldn’t get my foot in the door, many of them say. And I know it’s not just a social dynamic they’re talking about, but something bigger that they can’t quite name. The thing they are hungry for—a place to be known, a place to be still in the face of the mystery and confusion of life, that thing that draws them to sit in the back pew of a great stone cathedral on a Sunday morning when they might have been at brunch with friends—too often it seems tertiary at any church they might attend. There, God feels like a distant ruler they’ve already managed to disappoint. In these moments, I think of those thin, papery layers I detected when I was a child in church. These people are yearning for a beating heart, and can’t find it. What would it mean to drop the creeds and the chasubles and see what was left? Bread, wine, the words of Jesus. A table. Water for baptism and oil for anointing. What would happen if we stripped it all away?
That question lives just below my rib cage, tucked in the hollow where, I’d learned as a brass player, my diaphragm is located. There it gestates. In my fancy church office five floors up from the street, I pick up the phone and forget who it is I’m dialing. Each day I come to work and plan the worship that takes place beneath the flying buttresses of that sanctuary. I click down in my heels and rope off pews, checking that the microphones will be in the right locations. I organize the worship of God for the eight hundred souls who file in on Sunday, but it’s feeling more and more like a production for broadcast instead of a service of worship.
Meanwhile the hulking church is roiling with conflict. Learning to navigate the politics is like playing Operation, that game I played as a kid. One bad move and everybody’s hollering, their noses lighting up red. Motivated congregants bring fresh ideas for growth or justice work to a committee, only to be told, “Oh, that will step on the membership committee’s toes” or “We couldn’t possibly find the budget.” After a few shots, they lose momentum and leave dejected. I hear similar stories from my fellow divinity school graduates at their first posts, of meetings rife with roadblocks and passive aggression. Sitting in a meeting as we squabble about money or field a litany of complaints about a recent typo in the bulletin, I imagine Jesus sitting in one of the wheeled chairs at the conference table, watching us with his eyebrows raised. He isn’t pleased.
I’m imagining a community where no conference tables are necessary. Something that feels warm and intimate. Everyone will wear a name tag because we all feel nameless in this city, shuffling down the stairs through the turnstiles to the subway to be carried along below the teeming streets. In a place where hardly anyone has room in their cramped apartment for a dining table, cooking and eating together feels particularly potent. It could be simple but hearty—soup and bread instead of a thin wafer—recalling the practices of early Christians, whose celebrations of the Eucharist took place at the table, over a full meal.* The food will be warm, the singing simple, the prayers from the heart. No one will leave hungry.
* * *
The Question begins to demand more room.
On a brisk April evening, I meet Rachel at Grand Central Terminal amid a swirl of commuters charging home. She’s flown east for the baby shower of a friend in New Haven. Together, we board the train and find a pair of red and blue pleather seats where we can sit facing each other.
By the time we reach Bridgeport I am telling her about the Question and its secret growth. Rachel is no stranger to invasive ideas; she listens with a pointed focus. I tell her I want to build a congregation for people like her and me—people who don’t find a place so easily in church but are looking for God, nonetheless: in the way the shavings fall with grace to the floor from the wood as it’s carved, or in the catch of a breath between tumbling chromatics of Stravinsky.
Together on the train, we start crosshatching ideas, the cadence of our words picking up in excitement. Is it possible to create a church that’s made of real life? Where people eat together around a table and sing, and where we invite the questions that have seemed muted at every church we’ve ever attended? I tell her I want people to feel like it’s okay to swear. There will be no “church version” of ourselves, she offers, scrubbed down and shined up to cover the mess. We’ll come because God will be revealed in us. In our swearing, bawdy, actual selves who make crude jokes or sometimes get a little too drunk. There will be bread and wine and the mystery that we’ve encountered in our art and long to encounter with a community of friends. I want to name it after Lydia, a woman in the Book of Acts. When she’s remembered at all, Lydia is remembered for her hospitality, hosting the apostles. Reading between the lines of biblical text, we catch sight of an uncommon woman. She’s a merchant who sells expensive purple cloth, often worn by royalty, heading her own business and her own household, no husband in sight. After her conversion, she is a founding leader of the church in Philippi.1 Could our church be as powerful, inviting, and unflinching as she was?
For All Who Hunger Page 3