 I spent years as an archaeologist and will always have an archaeologist in me. Archaeologists deal with time, so I have to provide a chronological overview. I was born and raised Episcopalian. My father and mother worked at Episcopal boarding schools, my grandfather was an Episcopal priest, and Episcopal faith and practice was just natural and part of life for me. Then, in college, I began studying anthropology and decided religion was something other people did. I left the church for about 15 years. However, I never fully departed. I made my academic focus the archaeology of religion and ritual. I kept a variety of odd practices and prayer. Finally, I returned to my church about seven years ago and have not looked back.
So, why do I, a person who tried to turn his religion into a distant object of study, think I should now be a priest? I wasn't a bad archaeologist. I wasn't brilliant in any respect, but I did occasionally say something interesting about the past. I was comfortable doing it. As I go back to school with all the sacrifices that entails, as I start at the bottom of the heap again, as I try to teach myself a few new tricks, I ask whether this is what I'm called to be doing on a regular basis. Perhaps chronology is relevant here. Our path is always a dialog with where we have been as we seek where we are called to go. I have to draw on a lifetime of calling to follow a specific call now.
I was 10 years old, an acolyte, Christmas Eve, at a midnight service. Standing in the sacristy of St. Andrew's Church, Tennessee, it's cold and still outside, the church is dark, lit only by flickering candles. Incense swirls out of the thurible, my cassock is hitched up, I'm bleary eyed from being up so late. Everything is fragile and at the edge of a new creation. I didn't know then, and I still wonder now, exactly what God is. But, I knew then that the presence of God must feel a lot like that. I want to help people find that same connection. I know with all my heart it is there and that we need it.
Eighteen years later, during my unchurched period, I'm in the chapel of the Virgin of Copacabana, in Copacabana, Bolivia. Located at the side of the main sanctuary, it is almost a cave. Cool, soot-blackened walls are lit only by hundreds of candles on two huge stone tables. Even when I was the least churched, and working in a strange country as a stranger, I religiously lit candles in that space. I told my friends I was just honoring local practices, but I remember praying quietly, happy to be keeping a faith, happy to not be alone in faith, but to be surrounded by the candles of others. I now realize I want to make sure there are people and communities who can help people find their faith.
Seven years ago, sitting in my dining room on a Sunday morning, I was seized by an inescapable desire, one that I could not explain at the time, to go to back to my church. I walked into St. Paul's and felt almost weak with happiness to see the red BCPs standing faithfully in the dark pew backs, to smell the lingering incense, to be surrounded with our symbols and stories, to know when to stand and when to sit, to join the great throng and be lost in the rhythms and cadences of our common worship. I want to make sure we continue to offer these gifts to the world, I can't think of anything more important.
Anthropologists describe the ways that ritual and religion function in society. Religion orders the world, it can be used, for good and bad, to transform lives and societies. It was a stunning insight to me when I was able to open my heart to my own religion and say, Yes! We do this work! And moreover, it is important, meaningful, a gift to the world, and I believe it too! I can work in this world, I can use what I was given as a child, what I have as gifts, and what I have learned and build something other than my CV. I can help build the most important thing in this world, strong communities of faith.
I come home from church work energized, excited. I want to do more, I want to preach, and teach, and build communities in a world that is trying very hard to break into individuals. I can't imagine anything more valuable in a fracturing world than working to build wholeness. In our common journey of faith we honor the past and use it in the present to realize God's future. We take what God began through Jesus Christ – an outpouring of grace, and love, and forgiveness, and incarnate divine understanding. We add to this the gifts of the church, and our lives, and we put it together over and over again at the Eucharistic table. And then, and this is the best, we go from that table to the world.
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