Friends,

I have a lot of personal history at Virginia Theological Seminary, which is just a short drive from St. Luke’s. I graduated from VTS in 2014, got hit by a car immediately after my graduation, and then got married there just a few months later. Seminary was not an easy time for me. I honestly wouldn’t trade it for the world, but you couldn’t pay me enough to go back. Seminary is just an innately weird time in the lives of people preparing for ordained ministry.

Yesterday I found myself on campus late for a meeting with someone I barely knew, and I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to meet about. I arrived in the little café they have. There were students there, but they were all going about their business in total silence. There were two men in cassocks whispering to each other uncomfortably close. This initially struck me as weird, but seminary often attracts people that are a bit different, so I went about business thinking little of these odd encounters. My cohort was late to the meeting, and I figured maybe he forgot so I sent him an email, but I started getting all of these weird error messages. I decided to take this unexpected bit of free time to walk around the academic building to ponder my past time there. I walked by classrooms where I spent an insane amount of time, and they were largely unchanged. The whole experience was surreal enough by itself, but what made so much weirder is that I kept running into student and facility going about their day in silence acting as if they couldn’t see me. Then I realized, I must be dreaming.

I just happen to be in an academic building where I spent a disproportionate amount of time in the strangest time in my life, I’m supposed to meet someone for a meeting I don’t understand, my technology is refusing to work for no apparent reason, and people are treating me like I don’t exist. Surely, this must be a dream. I have never been conscious in a dream before… at least that I can remember, so I didn’t really know what to do. I wandered around and studied the people. I recognized some of the professors. One waved, but still didn’t say anything. Everyone else was some grim looking stranger on their way to somewhere. I eventually made my way back to my computer and coffee and wondered when I would wake up, and then my cohort arrived abruptly and loudly apologized for being late, at which point everyone turned around and looked at us. My mouth was agape because I realized I wasn’t dreaming, and someone went over and said they were having a “quiet day”, where they needed to be in prayerful, silent contemplation. It turns out that was real life, my cohort just wanted to chat about Churchy stuff, and I unwittingly walked into a special seminary function unawares that something different was happening.

Quiet days are very good for seminarians. Personally, I didn’t really like them, but most of my classmates did and greatly value them. I want to make it clear that I think the practice of quiet days is a good thing that should continue, but here’s the thing: it’s still incredibly weird and awkward. Being a good and being weird (especially to an outside observer) are not mutually exclusive things. If you are like me, our Sunday morning worship feels familiar. I grew going to the Roman Catholic Church, and our style of worship is all I know. I didn’t always like Church or find it meaningful, but it has always felt familiar, but this is not the experience for most. For most, our worship feels anachronistic, cultish, confusing, and downright weird. They aren’t necessarily wrong.

We worship the son of the one true God who was born to a virgin two thousand years ago on the other side of the world. He belonged to a faith heritage of thousands of years of stories and prophecies about God relationship with that particular people. Our style of worship is greatly influenced by ancient Roman style, which are the same people that dominated over Jesus’s people and ultimately killed him, before adapting Christianity as the official religion of their empires a couple of centuries later. We proclaim that Christ rose from the dead, and we give thanks for our salvation by blessing bread and wine every Sunday and claim that we are eating the body and blood of Christ. I believe all of this to be good and true, and it feels familiar, but do not be fooled, this is odd to the outsider, and it is the outsider that we need to welcome.

I think everyone at the Seminary café thought I knew what was going on. I was wearing my priest collar and the whole bit, so surely, I knew why everyone was silent and acting so weird. My hope is that if a regular staff person or visitor to the campus showed in their street clothes that the seminarians would have broken their silence and warmly welcomed them to their community like a normal human being. I have the same hope for our community. Our worship may feel familiar to us, but we should be inviting and welcoming people into Church who are completely unfamiliar with our worship. The worst thing we can do is get so into our own thing that we forget to be welcoming or feel fear of breaking decorum or ritual to help someone who clearly looks out of their element.

Another temptation to be avoided is to make our worship feel more normal. Something more akin to a PTA meeting, lecture or concert could put people at ease. For me, it kind of defeats the point. Our proclamation, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” speaks to a conviction that something new has happen in the fabric of existence, and worshipping in that belief should feel different, even unsettling, and downright weird.

The task for those seminarians on quiet days, and for us on Sunday morning isn’t necessarily finding a balance between embracing our own sort of weird and being assessable and welcoming to outsiders, it’s about doing both radically. Those seminarians can and should lean into the quiet days and all of the other quirks of that niche religious community, and boldly welcome a very confused visitor even if that means disrupting what Churchy thing they are doing. In the same way, I expect to embrace the mysteries Holy Eucharist and all of the other esoteric rituals unapologetically, but I am actively encouraging you to be disruptive, irreverent and to break all sorts of decorum if it means making someone feel welcome in the Church. This isn’t diluting our religion, instead it is opening it up.

Blessings,

Nick