And on that train steadily moving north along the cold shore Rachel says yes: if you do this, I will come and help you.
* * *
If you have ever found yourself sketching something that does not yet exist on a napkin as you wait for a friend to arrive at the corner bar, you could be in trouble. Something is happening that you are no longer in charge of.
When you begin to speak to your friends about this idea, to outline with qualifying language—“I’ve been wondering about” or “It might look like…”—and test them for signs of affirmation, you may be experiencing something resembling a call. When words feel too pale and insufficient for what you are trying to describe, but a few fellow dreamers can catch sight of it, their eyes narrowing in discovery and their lips curving into smiles, you are in very deep trouble. You have caught a kind of fever, and your life will likely change in unexpected, delightful, and troublesome ways.
I talked to everyone I knew. I called my mentor, Donald, in San Francisco and asked for materials for a dinner liturgy they used to have at his church called the “Feast of Friends.” The idea gathered form and shape, became a “something” from nothing. Invisible bits of life drawn from the air, like a starter gathering yeast, and it was there. Suspended in the darkness, taking on shape and form.
There’s a name for this stage, though I didn’t know it at the time. Kyna Leski, a researcher at MIT, calls it “gathering.”2 It’s a precreative time of drawing together, sketching and researching and pinning scraps on bulletin boards. It involves going down a lot of rabbit holes and obsessing about ideas that eventually end up on the cutting-room floor. It’s part of the process, as they say. For us, this gathering stage, this germination, lasted the proverbial nine months.
The idea was to let the symbols speak for themselves. The bread, the wine, the table. The oil and the water. To create a place where their meaning was so transparent that no one would ever say, “It’s lovely, but what does it mean?”
It never would have happened if I wasn’t aching with loneliness. If I had been clacking along a more familiar track of dinner and drinks, a ring of friends around me, secure in my own place in the world and headed toward an identifiable destination, St. Lydia’s might never have been. My barely repressed need for connection was the very thing that allowed me to see so clearly the longings of others.
In a city of glimmering lights and cracked sidewalks, every soul, whoever they may be, in an unguarded moment when their children are sleeping in bed, or when they hear the subway rumble deep underground, or when they catch sight of the skyline pink and flushed at twilight, will allow the brusque manner or affected laugh to slip away from their shielded hearts and remember, as if in a dream, that there is something they are searching for that they have not yet found.
They know that the rope has frayed and snapped, and that they, just like me, are in their own small wooden boats, lost on the sea.
I couldn’t bear to feel like we were drifting away from each other, carried apart on the deep. So I set tables, hoping we could all find our way home.
* As documented by historians and evidenced by an early Christian instruction manual called “The Didache,” Eucharistic celebrations in the early Church took the form of a shared meal, often hosted by a wealthy Christian.
Heather ran up a table runner on her sewing machine. A friend from high school whose dark hair was often streaked with electric blue or pink, she carved a potato stamp with the logo Rachel had designed for us, then printed it neatly on each end of the runner. A square with a semicircle positioned at each side, the logo could have been a cross, or four chairs at a table. Now we were ready for church.
St. Lydia’s met for the first time in the apartment of my friend Daniel, an Episcopal priest who mentored me during a summer internship in California. He did a stint as a monk, but God had something slightly different in mind. Daniel kicked up his heels, moved to San Francisco, and married an unfairly handsome actor named Javier. He still had a monkish way about him—wise, glimmering eyes framed by smile lines, and the kind of steady presence you’d expect from someone who spent a decade at prayer. He could have stood in for a Jedi in one of the Star Wars movies. When I told him about this church we wanted to create, he said that when he and Javier moved to Lower Manhattan that winter, he would host in his apartment and preside. He was the only person I knew with a place big enough to hold twelve people.
By strange circumstance, Daniel lived in the same building as Heather, so she threw together a winter vegetarian stew in her apartment, carried it onto the elevator with pot holders, and knocked on her new neighbor’s door for the first time. Inside, we smoothed her freshly stamped runner across Daniel’s table, right in the middle of the moving boxes, and began to welcome people as they arrived. There was Jake, a friend from San Francisco and incognito rock drummer; a colleague from divinity school; a church musician; and a choreographer I wrote music for. It was an eclectic group, brimming with enthusiasm. The twelve of us crowded around Daniel’s modest table, our elbows bumping.
“Looks like we need a larger table,” Jake said, grinning as he pulled his chair up to a corner. I was thrilled. On our first gathering, we were already out of space, and Jake seemed to be implying we should do this again!
Those first services felt like workshops. Privately, we rehearsed for what would come next, sketching the shape and smoothing the liturgy. The first night, sitting at the table and listening to Heather quiz Daniel on life in a monastery, I felt my heart glow like embers. There we were, gathered together in a city where no one’s supposed to know their neighbors.
That night I read the story of the child knit together in the womb of a girl called Mary. It was four weeks before Christmas. A time of preparation for God to be born among us, known to Christians as the season of Advent. Around Daniel’s table, we met for the first time as a church and waited for the whole cosmos to shift.
* * *
What do you do when you have a church but no building? The four services at Daniel’s apartment have gone well—there’s energy and excitement for more. But as Jake said, we’ve already outgrown our table. I start wandering the city, unsure what I’m looking for, but led forward by a whiff of possibility. I’m searching for some magical thing…a place that will house our brand-new church in a city where monthly rent exceeds the total balance of my retirement account.
There is a feeling of delight and magnetic intuition. I peer into empty storefronts hung with crooked For Rent signs, imagining our crew cooking a warm meal in the deserted restaurant kitchen. Every empty building pulses with what might be. There are no budgets yet, no price tags, time lines, or schedules—just pure dreams unfettered by reality.
Conversations with friends and colleagues lead me to meetings with a bizarre assortment of people. Someone connects me with a wealthy Episcopalian who lives in a neighborhood I didn’t even know existed. The street seems to hang suspended over the East River, gray row houses squatting heavily together like overweight pigeons on a wire. I am buzzed up to a labyrinthine apartment, all brassy fixtures polished to a gleam, where I perch on a floral settee and tell the gentleman of the house about my idea for St. Lydia’s.
“Well, you’d certainly have room in here,” he comments mildly, gesturing to the dining room behind him. The sturdy oak table is about a mile long; china stands at attention behind glass. Somehow it doesn’t seem quite the setting. Dinner Church should be humble—accessible to teenagers begging for change and their dogs too. I didn’t want anyone to wonder which fork they should use.
I poke my head into church buildings as well. Some towering structures make me feel cold inside, others draw me toward them. It’s pleasurable, existing in this place of sheer possibility. Nothing’s pinned down or entirely real. St. Lydia’s is unformed and ephemeral, and so it has the liberty of being perfect.
* * *
—
Jake wonders if the Lower East Side might be a good neighborhood, so, one bright December Saturday, I ride the F train to the Broadway-Lafayette station. Aboveground, I drift among the tenement buildings. They lean under their own weight, their facades zigzagged by fire escapes, their stoops worn uneven under the shoes of last century’s immigrants and seamstresses or this century’s socialites and trust-fund babies. Farther north, in Alphabet City, tiny record shops are stuffed in basement-level storefronts, the splatter of jazz spilling out into the street. In Tompkins Square Park, guys thunder by on skateboards, boom boxes blaring, while a dime bag passes from hand to hand on the corner.
On Avenue B and Ninth Street, I pass a modest brick building with a small garden, its borders defined by a neat iron fence. Inside, plants grow in tidy rows, and homeless men sprawl on the steps, eating chili from paper bowls.
The garden belongs to a church, though the building doesn’t look like one. There is no steeple, no big steps or giant door. Just a three-story structure nestled behind this gated garden, and a cherry tree bowing its branches toward simple stained-glass windows on the second floor. That little church looks like they’re up to something, I think. I like how the men on the steps look at ease: as if they finally have a moment to breathe in a city that never tires of telling them to move along.
Peering around the corner, I see a line for the soup kitchen spilling out the modest door and down the wheelchair ramp. I say hello to the gentlemen waiting with their carts and bags, and make my way up to the door. There stands a solid woman whose name, I will later learn, is Lupita.
“Hi!” I call to her over the heads in line. “Is this a church?”
“Yes, it’s a church!” she shouts, scowling at her clipboard and making furious marks in ballpoint pen. The men file past her into a community room where there’s a buffet line.
“Would it be okay if I looked at the sanctuary?” I ask her.
“Yeah, okay,” she shouts without looking up and waves me inside.
The church’s first floor is dedicated to feeding people, while the sanctuary is tucked upstairs. It’s quite an architectural statement, placing your ministry to the hungry on the first floor. I dodge the line and climb the staircase, passing through a set of double doors and into a modest square room. Simple cushioned chairs face a communion table. Behind it, tall windows usher in the winter light.
I can see it immediately. The chairs will be stacked to one side. Four circular tables will be spread with cloths and food. Congregants laughing and talking and sharing a meal in this small and holy space. I don’t stay long. But I can see it.
* * *
The next week I swallow my fear of phone calls and dial the number listed on Trinity Lower East Side’s website. To my chagrin, the pastor actually picks up the phone. I was hoping I could just leave a message.
“Trinity Lower East Side, this is Pastor Phil,” he says.
“Ummm, hi, this is Emily Scott?” I fumble. I lurch my way through an explanation—that I’m working on starting a new church community that will share a meal and would the church be open to renting space to us?
“Why don’t you send me a proposal?” he says. He spells out his email address. Two weeks later, Rachel and I are sitting on the futon in his office.
Pastor Phil listens intently to us, his fingers interlaced in his lap. He sits across from us in a big, lumpy armchair, wearing a crisp printed dress shirt and a gray cabled cardigan that looks so soft I have to restrain myself from reaching out to touch it. He’s a lean man, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a goatee. His green eyes are kind but inscrutable. It’s hard to read him. The office, I notice, feels a bit like the neighborhood: scruffy and a little threadbare from use and love. There is nothing shiny or polished here.
“So we would have worship like the first Christians did,” I tell him, rattling on about isolation in the city, about how so many young people feel alienated from the church. He seems like someone who would understand, this pastor who sits in a scuffed-up office while the smells of chili and homeless people waft up from downstairs, but I am nervous. I hope I’m not insulting the church he’s devoted his life to, or rubbing him the wrong way. He fixes those green eyes on me with an intimidating intensity as we spill out our vision. Rachel flashes her big smile.
In that moment, I don’t know that Pastor Phil grew up, and then served, in a more conservative branch of the Lutheran tradition before he found his way to a more affirming denomination. I don’t know that when he came out, he lost the faith of his childhood, his colleagues, and his friends. I know nothing of the pain he’s shouldered, simply to be who he is. All I know is that he seems legitimate: a real pastor with a real collar and a real office. And I feel like the opposite of that—some young, unordained woman who thinks she can start a church.
Rachel and I finally run out of words and lapse into silence. The angle of the futon tilts back a bit, so we’re forced to either sit forward awkwardly on the edge, or lean back so our feet don’t quite touch the floor, as if we’re two little kids.
Pastor Phil shakes his head and closes his eyes for a moment, thinking. Then he pins his green-eyed gaze on us.
“I think it’s wonderful,” he says, delivering each word as if it were a precious artifact. “The church has failed to provide a place for so many people, and I think that something like this, something that’s different, something that feels alive, something that’s less formal, is exactly what people are looking for. And I think that Trinity should absolutely support this in any way we can.”
Rachel and I look at each other, astonished. Pastor Phil gets it. We don’t have to do gymnastics to explain. He just understands.
“I think you should start worshipping here in the spring,” Pastor Phil tells us, “and I’m going to encourage the Church Council to not accept any rent at all. We should be supporting this kind of project. As a ministry!”
* * *
—
A few weeks later I’m meeting with Pastor Phil and the chair of the Church Council. I’m surprised to walk into the office and see a woman not too much older than I am: a PhD student who seems just as positive about our project as Pastor Phil is. The two of them start talking about how they could rearrange the furniture in the back office to make room for a desk for us.
That’s how things will always be with Trinity. Whenever my heart clenches, expecting churchy, bureaucratic red tape or fussing from the Church Council about budget or building use, instead there are people who only seem interested in saying yes. Trinity doesn’t have money to spare. But they feed everyone who walks in their door—two hundred people a day—and scoot around their furniture to make room for a brand-new Dinner Church.
Soon there’s a desk in the corner of the office, wedged between the wall and the photocopier. Rachel and I walk to the Staples down the street and choose ninety-eight dollars’ worth of office supplies—our first purchase from a nonexistent budget—with trepidation. Trinity doesn’t have Wi-Fi yet, but there’s a single ethernet cord we can use. Every Wednesday we have “staff meetings,” working side by side, passing the ethernet cord back and forth between us like a hookah, depending on who needs to be online.
* * *
—
In pregnancy, there’s a magic moment called “quickening.” It’s the first time you feel movement in the uterus—a flutter like a butterfly that lets you know life has drawn together. For months, cells have been growing and dividing, but now it’s clear: something new is here.
St. Lydia’s was quickening—we were coming into being. But our quickening required people: friends and mentors, gathered around this dream. Each member of this scrappy community brought something to share. Heather with her table runner. Daniel with his prayers and his apartment. Rachel with her vision. Pastor Phil and his church with their open doors.
It strikes me that the people who crowded around to help
midwife St. Lydia’s into being all had something in common. Each had the gift of seeing something that was coming, but had not yet arrived. Rachel could take a scrap of possibility—the rope that hung limp from a bucket—and notice that it was beautiful. Pastor Phil had the same gift, only he saw possibility in people. He was the kind of pastor who saw something true about you before you could see it yourself. “You are a preacher and a pastor,” he would tell me, pinning me with those piercing eyes, long before I could see it.
This capacity—in an artist, a pastor, a parent, a prophet—is deeply tied to the work of God. In the season of Advent, we wait on a God who breaks into a world chained by brutality and fear. We know that the world around us is crumbled, aching, and yet some of us have eyes to see what might be, and give that possibility a name. Some of us have hands that can usher God’s world into this one, bringing light and hope. Love is birthed in a darkened world; she takes a first wrenching breath, and cries. This, we call incarnation.
For All Who Hunger Page 4