I used to think so. If we are all a bunch of people dependent on the faith of our fathers, who are dependent on their fathers, who are dependent on their…then who actually believes? I would ask this and spiral into a dark and doubting place, push the thought aside, and try to move on with my day. It was one of those gnawing questions I was embarrassed to ask aloud.
Today when I think back on that year and see how desperately I clung to my faith inheritance, I don’t see it as a hole or weakness. Instead, it reminds me of something: how Christians have always been since the beginning of the church. This reliance and dependence began to look like God’s design for us, rather than a coping mechanism or a scrambling attempt at belief.
The early church began not long after Christ’s death. The early church members were close to Jesus; maybe some had seen him pass through their towns or perform a miracle. Perhaps one guy told a few friends about his eyewitness account of Jesus, and then those friends multiplied into a crowd, which turned the first guy into their leader, their pastor. He was simply relaying what he knew to be true to those who then relayed it to others. Until eventually, the church was just a group of people relying on each other, passing down information, remembering, believing, and encouraging. This is not weak or wrong. This is the church. I don’t think we’re called simply to rely on each other for comfort during the hard times or guidance during the confusing times. We’re called to rely on each other for faith in general. When we don’t know why or how to believe, we ask someone who believed before we did, and they remind us again of what is true and what our ancestor’s ancestor’s ancestor saw.
I remember Ben making the argument with me that if Jesus was the Son of God, why did we all have to go to church every Sunday to remind each other of that?
“Isn’t that what church is?” he asked. “A bunch of people affirming each other in their beliefs. If it’s true and God and Jesus are real, why do you have to remind each other of that once a week?”
It was a valid point. It was the type of observation I would have made if I had not been a Christian for so long. At the time, his question was unnerving, but today, I would tell him, yes, exactly. That’s the entire purpose of church.
Think about all the lessons we are taught and believe because our teachers in school taught them to us. I trust grammar. I trust biology. I trust physics and chemistry and geometry because they were taught to me, their methods trusted and passed down for centuries. When Ben asked about the purpose of church, he was asking a much bigger question. He was asking why humans must gather and remind each other of truth, why we must pass it down and teach and reteach and relearn. He was asking, Why must humans rely on each other? And I ask, How could we not?
What we hear in church today is a passing down of scenes witnessed more than two thousand years ago. Our memory of that time has faded, so we need help to remember. Legacy is our memory keeper, and the church is our memory refresher. It’s true that we have the Holy Spirit. And he is alive in us, yes. And no, we weren’t left to our own devices. We have this Helper. But we also have our sin nature and an Enemy that is alive, well, and roaming. We have these things that work against our memory so that by Monday morning we have forgotten him, Christ, who he is and what that means for us.
And during our week, we function in this cloud of remembering and this desire to forget. We move and walk forward in this confliction and show up to our church, however that looks on whatever day that takes place and whatever place it takes place in, and we ask our pastors to remind us. We beg our friends beside us to teach us again who Jesus is, and as we listen to the words or the songs or see the Scripture in front of us for the first time in days, we begin to let Jesus resettle into us. We begin to remember why, when, and how. The death, the Resurrection, the stuff that all actually happened—the truth of it drips slowly into our cups, and we take a sip and remember, and we take another sip and remember, unaware of our thirst until that moment. Our children around us watch and see, and some of them know, and some of them will know someday soon, but we don’t leave them out; we don’t dare leave them behind. We all drink deeply, and we know. We know because our fathers passed down a faith that was passed down to them by their fathers, and those fathers had friends who were friends of Jesus, friends who saw and told the stories that are retold to us. The story hasn’t changed, and what was written holds true.
6
A Spoon in My Tea
Though Oxford as a city felt a little spiritually dead to me, especially during winter, it is a city that appears very holy. With its old churches still standing and its rich history in the faith, the holiness of Oxford is a notch above the rest. And for Lent, the church’s most anticipated season, it was an incredible place to be.
Lent took over Oxford in a holy way. An ancient practice taking place in an ancient city—there was something special about this Lenten season. You could feel it in the city’s walls, in the frozen grass in South Park, in the air turned so very cold. In the snow that lay on the ground in my backyard. Oxford’s streets went somber. Its very ground sat still in reverence. The snow remained for weeks, holding out and holding out and holding out. No new life yet. The city covered itself in a thin layer of mourning fog and holy fasting. The Oxford college chapels held nighttime choir concerts in their naves. In our church we recited the respectful liturgy, and our mouths moved in unison, our voices all swirled into one that went upward.
Yes, Oxford during Lent was an incredible place to be if you were cognizant enough, awake enough, or alert enough to be aware of it.
But I wasn’t. I hated Lent that year. And I hated Oxford during Lent.
I, who decided to fast from caffeine for those forty days plus Sundays, did not walk around in the wonderment of the season. I did not appreciate the traditional hymns I heard coming from inside the college chapels—chapels I passed by while grumbling insane thoughts to myself that arose from a caffeine-deprived mind and body. The snow did not feel like a holy misting on the city. It was cold and it irritated me and forced me into shops, where I stood grudgingly to thaw my hands with my breath.
And my toes, oh my toes during that season were so perpetually half-numb, and I wore my enormous down coat and my thick wool hat every single day. Every day I was blanketed and covered, blowing on my fingers and forgetting why I had ever left south Texas. It seemed so senseless on those miserable, cold nighttime bike rides home in February and March. March no better than February. March giving me no relief or reason to have faith that spring would indeed come as it always did. March, instead, gave me an eerie sense that I had stepped into the winter part of Narnia, and there would be no Aslan to melt the snows away.
During my study-abroad semester in Oxford, I took a class called Oxford Through the Ages, where we walked around the city a couple of times a week and stopped at various historically significant places to learn about them. One of those places was the cathedral at Christ Church college—the beautiful glowing building you see on all the Oxford postcards. The cathedral at Christ Church has holiness built into its walls. Holiness and history, which are the same, I guess, when you’re talking about cathedrals. This cathedral was arguably the most-discussed and rigorously tested Oxford site we visited for the class. Oxford’s patron saint, Saint Frideswide, is buried there, and a stone shrine marks her resting place. Near the shrine are three long and tall pieces of stained glass. Each pane tells a different part of her story, her legend. Frideswide. The patron saint.
I was reminded of this Frideswide character when I attended a Christmas service at Christ Church, right before my unholy Lent. The lessons about her returned to me vaguely as we sat and recited liturgy and watched a priest scuttle from this place to that. Raising his hands, putting them back down. This is probably not true, but I imagine old Saint Frideswide to be a harsh woman with wide hips and a narrow face. Her character the opposite of Aslan’s. Stiff and cold, like someone who actually enjoys winter. For this, sitting there in her dedicated cathedral, I began to resent her.
I began to blame her for the winter, as if her ghost haunted the town still and determined whether or not spring could come.
During the Christmas service at Christ Church, I sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair that rested on a stone floor built in the eighth century. The walls to my right and left had witnessed church history unfold between them. I should have closed my eyes in awe and felt grateful. I should have sung with something deep inside me, some sort of reverence. To sit there was an honor. People made pilgrimages to that very place, simply to attend a service. But instead, there I sat, unappreciative, hallucinating about Oxford’s patron saint.
Aside from Saint Frideswide and uncomfortable chairs, all I remember from the cathedral service is darkness and cold and blurs of red robes quickly walking past us, letting out very high-pitched sounds.
I can’t help but wonder if the ghost of Saint Frideswide disapproved of my irreverence at the Christmas service, where she undoubtedly observed me from her high and mighty seat in the beautiful stained glass. I wonder if her ghost followed me home that night and then haunted me a little bit during my unholy Lent, her image ever-present in my subconscious. That stern face and tilted head, illuminated by a halo, looking down upon me in judgment for my lack of holiness, making everything just a tad colder than it already was.
When I chose to fast from caffeine, my coffee addiction was relatively new. It had begun two years before, when I was a junior in college. That’s the year I learned to make real coffee in a real coffeemaker. At age twenty, making coffee in a coffeemaker and then pouring it into a big ceramic mug each morning made me feel very grown up, like I was really in my twenties.
Drinking coffee was all about appearances at first. Holding the mug. Standing in the kitchen with the mug. Pressing it against my cheek like my mom used to do. Eventually, after many consecutive days of making and drinking my regular coffee that was not iced or pumped with syrup, I acquired a taste for the actual flavor of the stuff. And once I acquired a taste for the real thing, it seemed I could never have enough. (Red wine, now that I think about it, has this same effect.)
One cup of coffee in the morning quickly became two cups in the morning. And then two cups in the morning became two cups in the morning plus one in the afternoon, and in less than a year, I was a three-cups-a-day coffee consumer. I didn’t even think about it. The addiction was robotic. Around three in the afternoon my feet simply began to walk to the nearest coffee shop. They still do. It happens subconsciously. It is not a choice.
I tell you, it is not a choice.
My addiction became embarrassingly obvious in Oxford because no one shared it with me. I think the British, after all these years, are still wary of coffee. In my observance at least, the addiction has not quite swept them up like it has so many of us in the States. Sometimes I even wondered if they knew what coffee was. I began to learn that if I showed up somewhere and the hostess offered me coffee, she might be referring to hot water with a powdery brown substance that tastes bad and is not caffeinated to my standards. If you get nothing else from this book, please hear this: instant coffee is not coffee. And I would rather drink the hot water by itself, thank you.
Perhaps it was this misunderstanding and overall blasé attitude toward coffee, along with the many, many comments I received about my frequent Starbucks visits, that drove me to give up caffeine for Lent in Oxford. Rather than wean myself off it and cut one of my three cups a day, I figured I might as well cut all of them out at once.
People have mentioned to me that I can be extreme. Either all in or all out. I’ve never been able to find that place others talk about so much—the middle ground.
There are other possible reasons I gave up coffee for this particular Lent. At that point in my life, I wanted to be nearer to God, and perhaps subconsciously I felt the need to do some sort of penance to decrease the distance between us. Maybe a severe fast could accomplish this for me.
Or perhaps it was only superficial. I wanted to appear extra holy in my Anglican church or for my atheist friends, one of whom told me, “You know what I’m going to give up for Lent?”
“What?” I asked.
“Lent!” he laughed.
Why I chose to fast from caffeine is not really the point. The point is that I will never do it again. Not for Lent, not for any reason. Barring a serious health concern, coffee will remain my constant. The robotic addiction will be fostered with care. Because coffee is my friend. It is a type of confidant. It makes me feel like life is possible. It makes me happy. It makes mornings worth facing and living richer and more real, and I do not care how sick and junkie this sounds. It is my reality, and I have given myself grace. I have accepted this truth about myself. And now that I know I am capable of living without it—since I did for forty days plus Sundays—why would I ever, ever do it again?
In Oxford I resolved that if I could make it in life without caffeine for forty days, I could do anything. This, as you know, is the purpose of Lent. To test limits. To challenge yourself. To see if you can actually do it. To amaze the people around you with your dedication. This is the purpose of Lent, right? Right?
In the last several years I’ve noticed the evangelical church adapting more and more High Church practices. They talk about Lent now. At Advent, they light candles and stuff. They might even throw in the occasional response liturgy during a service. This is not how it was for me when I was young and a part of the Church of Christ denomination. We didn’t talk about Lent. That’s what the Catholics do, I thought, not us.
This ignorance did not last long. When I was in the sixth grade, I began attending a private school affiliated with the Episcopal Church. I went there throughout middle school and high school, and over the years I received education in the Episcopal Church and its traditions, as well as all the typical required learning in school. We kept them very separate—the church learning and the school learning.
Chapel was held every day at ten o’clock in the morning in a building we called the refectory. Our main chapel service of the year was our Ash Wednesday service, the one that marks the beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday service was a big deal and about an hour longer than our typical thirty-minute chapels.
I was in the choir, and the choir always performed on this important day. During warm-up, our choir director communicated to us, indirectly, that we needed to be extra good and sing extra well during this particular service. The refectory, which also served as our cafeteria, had windows all around, white tile floors, and a white paneled ceiling. The walls were painted white, and the lunch tables were white. It could be painfully bright in there.
If I squinted my eyes and looked out the windows toward the south, over the interstate and past some hills, I could see the sign for my church. Just behind that sign was the entrance to my neighborhood, where a mile or so of winding road took you up a hill to our house. My entire middle school and high school world took place within a three-mile radius.
The choir sat in the front of the room facing everyone else. This meant we could not get away with talking to our friends, passing notes, or texting. We had to sit, legs crossed, in our formal wear, which was a pleated skirt, button-up shirt, and tie. Even girls had to wear ties.
We also had to sing Kyrie eleison, which means “Lord, have mercy” in Greek, in smooth harmony, with no vibrato—a vocal practice that requires a surprising amount of energy and focus, especially for preteens.
I thought it was the most boring collection of notes ever written, this series of Kyrie eleisons. We practiced it before chapel over and over again, as if significant people would be attending rather than the typical crowd of 350 peers, teachers, and administrators, who often looked just as bored as we were.
“It’s not even a song,” we complained. “Why do we have to practice it so much?”
It wasn’t a song. It was the response in a certain part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy in which our chaplain would signal the entire congregation to sing. But we, as our choir director explained to us each
year, were the leaders of this response. We needed to sound good and strong and on key in order to help everyone else sound good, or at least to camouflage the array of sounds school-aged kids make while singing Kyrie eleison.
It went something like this:
CHAPLAIN: God, your love is unconditional.
US: Forgive our conditions.
CHAPLAIN SINGS: Ky-ri-e-e-le-e-i-son [breath] Ky-ri-e-e-le-e-i-son
WE SING: Ky-ri-e-e-le-e-i-son [breath] Ky-ri-e-e-le-e-i-son
We did some more back-and-forth and then sang again, “Ky-ri-e-e-le-e-i-son.” Over and over and over we sang this. To this day I can probably sing it with perfect pitch and no vibrato. Just as I was taught.
At my school, it was cool around the lunch table to talk about what you were going to give up for Lent, and in ninth grade, I did my first Lenten fast: no fried food. Fasting made me feel a little Episcopalian, which at the time felt a little against my religion and church upbringing. I liked this feeling. Participating in Lent made me feel edgy. But because the refectory served as both chapel and cafeteria, toward the end of the service, smells from the kitchen began to waft in, as if to tease us, saying, “You smell me. I’m a french fry. But you can’t eat me. Not for forty days.” I always thought holding Ash Wednesday in the refectory was a bit cruel for this reason.
Toward the end of the service, the ashes were distributed among foreheads. This is the part of Ash Wednesday where my evangelical-raised self drew the line. I did the standing and sitting dance of the liturgy. I partook in the Eucharist, dipping my bread in the cup. I recited the Nicene Creed (omitting, in my ignorance and self-righteousness, the part about “the holy Catholic church,” but that is another story for another time), and I pretended I felt comfortable in all these rituals, like my classmates who had gone through confirmation and been sprinkled as babies. I was the evangelical outsider who was an Episcopalian poser, except when it came to the ashes. The ashes, I could not stomach. They were dirty and I worried what my parents would think if I came home from school with a dark smear on my forehead. So during this part of Ash Wednesday—its namesake, the most important part, the point of it all—I remained seated and looked up at my friends and teachers, who rose in unison and filed into the aisles, ready to go forward and receive the soot in the shape of a cross.
English Lessons Page 7
