When I was in high school, I hated going to church. It’s not that I wasn’t Christian, though I have to say that it wasn’t until college of when teaching abroad that I really gave honest, mature thought to the tenets of Christianity. For me in high school, church was even more than just boring. I remember looking at a candle lit in a sconce on the wall of the worship space and thinking, “Each moment, I’m becoming less and less Christian.” Again, I wasn’t doubting Christianity or that, say, Jesus was God. It was simply that, sitting for an hour or more on a Sunday morning, listening to a sermon and to prayers that (I felt) had nothing at all to do with me or my experiences as a person, made me feel less enclined to engage with the spirituality as my church presented it.

I was, in many ways, engaging with spirituality in different ways as a young adult, it just wasn’t in the form of sermons and church-y things. I often wonder whether I would have been more interested in religion as a high schooler if I was in a liturgical tradition (I was raised in the Reformed tradition), but I’m not sure that’s it. To a certain degree, I retain a sort of disconnect with the way Christianity presents what I believe to be Truth. Why? To put it simply, for Tim as a high schooler and for Tim as a priest in his forties, there just aren’t enough trees and the isn’t enough darkness.

I promise not to get too deep into my own spirituality (that’s not the point of this blog), but I think that my own experiences are important when considering the Church and how people approach worship. You see, as a young child, I experienced God in the natural world. I didn’t call it that when I was a kid, but looking back, I can see that in wandering through the forest around my parents’ house, watching the trees go by on a very long bus ride to school (it was forty minutes both ways in a very rural, forested part of New Jersey), and experiencing the seasons planted something important inside of me, and as I grew older those seeds grew to be God’s wisdom. One of the reasons that I loved and still love the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is because Tolkien also gained wisdom in thinking about and living with trees, and he put this wisdom into his books. I ate this wisdom up as a kid. I grew towards it like plants grow towards the sun. I honored and, in my journals and early fiction writing, memorialized single moments of time when I felt the world had split apart and the light of God had shone through.

I remember one time when I was in late elementary school, and I came to a part of the forest that was all pine trees. Most of the forest around my parents’ house is ash, and so the sudden change to connifer was drastic. Moreover, it was late in the day, and the sunset was reddish orange. The whole forest looked like it was glowing, or on fire. And as a young boy, I didn’t think, “I’m seeing different trees than usual” or “I’m seeing the trees in the evening light” but “I’ve come to a special place in the forest that is otherwise hidden.” In the days and months and years that followed, I searched through the forest for this hidden place until later, maybe when I was in high school, I realized that the “red forest”, as I called it, was not a single place but the mingling of encounters with various characters of a single forest. In a way, I was disappointed to “lose” my secret, hidden world, but realizing this helped me appreciate that time of day and different types of forests that I have encountered, from those in Yellowstone to those in Japan.

And in all this, I gained something akin to wisdom. I didn’t “know” anything new about the world, not really. Instead, I was more attuned to the beauty of the world, the special quality of moments that come upon us suddenly, and the inner quality of the heart that responds to the world around us. I ended up studying these aspects of the world and of the self in college and graduate school, and I see them present in sacramental theology and each week in the celebration of the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Eucharist. 

I would also make the claim that my sensitivity to this aspect of the world was nurtured by playing video games. This might seem really weird to many of you reading this, but it’s true. In video games, especially older ones with limited capabilities, there is a developed sense of discovery that is, often, accompanied or enhanced by simple but evocative music. The music rarely has vocals and is very atmospheric (modern instrumental synthwave shares a lot of qualities with it), focusing the play on the experience of those individual discoveries that don’t always line up with the gameplay but to the sense or character or, again, atmosphere of the game’s world. And when there were vocals or the characters in the games talk, they often talk about philosophy and, in some cases, theology. It’s often a hard theology, one that struggles with grief and despair or the tragedies of living a human life. This is what I meant above when I wrote that, as a high schooler, I didn’t see enough darkness in the church. The non-verbal, atmospheric, theologically difficult aspects of Christianity and the human condition were simply not present in the church I attended as a high schooler, but they were all around me in the games I played and in my wandering through the forest.

Let’s move to the present day. I often hear my parishioners talking about what they like about Episcopal worship, and when I don’t hear their thoughts I ask them direction. Many people say they like the sermon (for which I thank them) or the sense of community or the worship space (we have beautiful stained glass windows at Christ Church). When I ask them about the Eucharist, they will either say “Oh yes, of course, that goes without saying” or they’ll get a very mystical look on their faces. This look is mirrored in the way they receive the Eucharist, which is always with one foot (or eye or half of their heart) in the mystical. I think that my parishioners go to church, in the end, because they find something True there. They find the darkness of reality made manifest. They find the wisdom of God spoken like those trees spoke wisdom to me. They find it in the music, the worship space, and the slow, though short, walk up to the Altar rail and the reception of Communion. 

If there’s anything that the modern Church needs to do, any change that we have to make, it is that we need to nurture these encounters with Truth and Wisdom that happen in the pews and before the Altar. We get so stuck on the right wording, the right action, or how to talk about politics from the pulpit while also pretending not to, but at the end of the day, we go to church because the world is deeper than we can possibly imagine, and we want to enter that darkness. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be doing important work in the world or caring for our words and action, but that everything should come from that well-spring that has no bottom: the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. (even using the word “inspiration” is too “bright”; this is a soul-gut level experience of the divine). 

What does all this look like? I’m hesitant to say much, because “the depth of divine connection” looks different for different communities, let alone different people. Priests and other church leaders need to know the character of the communities that we serve. We need to know what moves people to their depths, and we need to do whatever that is with a bright-eyed idealism that seems childish but is actually child-like. Whatever it is, though, it will center on the Eucharist, which is the physical presence of God in this world and the gateway to eternity.