Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

June 26, 2012

Mind the Gap

I’m on retreat, sort of.

This week I am working from my parents’ home in the Texas Hill Country. I’m answering emails, participating in conference calls, and checking things off that have fallen to the bottom of my to-do list. While not exactly a “retreat” in the fullest sense of the word, I’m savoring this as an opportunity to ground my work in prayer. And that, perhaps more than anything else, is what I’ve found myself needing lately.

This morning I woke up and meditated silently in the dewy field near my parents’ home. If today is like yesterday, I’ll stop at midday and go for a meditative walk (as meditative as one can be, I suppose, in the glaring Texas heat.) Doing so has reminded me of how much my spirituality is wrapped up in the landscape of this place: the limestone rock, the orange clays, the rosemary and oak, and the big Texas sky. As a kid, all these things awoke in me a sense of the divine; I was first spiritual and then later gravitated toward the Church.

A few days ago my sister asked me how things were going in New York. A huge question, I found myself saying that I was a bit surprised. After all, as someone who grew up in a resolutely secular home, I sought out the Church in high school in the hopes of finding a life that was simpler (less materialistic), deliberate (less frantic), and more wholistic (as opposed to partisan and dualistic). Instead, I find myself living in New York, occasionally addicted to my mobile device and work, and bracing myself for a conflictive, perhaps even toxic, General Convention.

The gap between what I originally set out to find and the present reality is startling. For a long while I chalked this up to having been naive, though I’m less inclined to think so now. I’m hearing more and more about this “gap” as I travel around the Church.

Last week I took the train to Virginia Theological Seminary to present a workshop to the returning class of 2009. Nearly everyone I met there was a priest and many were getting ready for job transitions, to bigger and more resourced Episcopal churches, many as first-time rectors. Nevertheless, one or two people frowned a bit when this expectation was raised in conversation and kindly demurred. One woman said something along the lines of “That whole track thing, where you go from being an assistant to an associate to a rector, each time at a wealthier place...that’s not why I became a priest.”

Why did you first walk into an Episcopal church? What were you looking for then? Have you found it? As leaders in Episcopal congregations, we need to be mindful of the gap between what starts us on our spiritual journeys and the wearying particularity of how we have institutionalized Church. We need to remember that we are not alone in sensing this disconnect (in fact, I believe this has much to do with the rise of the spiritual but not religious), and I think we need to be more courageous in addressing it. And so this summer, let’s carve out some time to “mind the gap.”