God still wasn’t speaking directly to me very often when, crawling out of Freshman year into Sophomore, I began to trust Him again. I was faithfully attending a tiny Church of Christ, a member of multiple Bible studies, a sometimes-worship-leader for a small group—and it was finally starting to touch my spirit again. That was when, just as I’d been planning to find a new church, I heard Him speak: in the middle of dressing for church on Sunday morning, something certain in my spirit said Go to Church of the Vine.
Church of the Vine is a local non-denominational-turned-Anglican church; I’d actually intentionally avoided it, since so many of my classmates in the Honors program attended there. I want to keep school a little more separate from church, I’d tell people—but I finally caved (a few weeks after I heard God nudge me—I’m a little stubborn) and attended my first service on All Saints Day, the first Sunday of November.
That first service, the girl so traumatized by past pressure to feel the right thing that her faith had become almost solely an intellectual pursuit—she cried at the Act of Contrition.
Given the Words
In the Anglican liturgy, the congregation kneels together just before taking Communion and prays a prayer for forgiveness, sometimes called the Act of Contrition. For my Scrupulosity-wrestling heart, those words meant everything.
Most merciful God, we prayed, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done and by what we have left undone. The prayer ends in the simplest, most wonderful request: For the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name.
Amen.
This was profound. It felt, in that moment, as though I had spent my whole life up until this point searching for the right words to confess, to repent, to ask Christ to help me return. Of course there’s no verbal formula for forgiveness—the Prodigal Son tried that, and his father would have none of it. But there’s a reason we’re still reciting prayers, like “Our Father, who art in heaven…”, centuries later; the words are tried and true, and they point us back to Christ.
Liturgy
The word “liturgy” always used to conjure up horrifically dull images for me. As a recent ADHD diagnosee, the thought of doing the same thing over and over again sounds torturous. If liturgical churches just chanted and prayed the same things every week, I was certain I would start tuning it out regardless of whether I meant to or not, the same way every Christian worship chorus tended to slip in one ear and out the other.
I learned, however, that there’s a subtle difference between repetition and rhythm.
Certainly there were parts of the liturgy I ended up memorizing—the Act of Contrition, the Nicene Creed, a smattering of prayers, calls, responses—but they’d been so carefully written and discerned, over hundreds of years, that each element seemingly dripped with truth. There are only so many ways for me to reflect on a good, good Father before my brain switches off; it feels like there is almost always something deeper to meditate on between the it is right and justs, the Lord, hear our prayers, the thanks be to Gods.
There are also times when my heart or my mind is somewhere else. There are Dark Nights of the Soul, periods of grief, weeks where the anxiety is so tangible I feel like I’m drowning. I used to think these would be the moments where the sameness would crush me under its monotony; instead, they were the moments I learned to be carried.
I don’t remember who I heard the phrase from, but someone at Church of the Vine described “being carried by the liturgy” when times got hard—it’s the best way I’ve found to express the idea of corporate worship. I never consciously learned that the burden of “worshipping the right way” fell on me, but somewhere along the road of my upbringing I’d begun to shoulder the weight of thinking, feeling, and knowing all the right things. If a song wasn’t moving me to tears, I wasn’t feeling the right thing; if my prayers weren’t lyrical or heartfelt enough, my heart wasn’t in the right place.
Liturgy taught me that no one’s heart is always going to “be in the right place”—it taught me what it meant for simply showing up to be an act of worship. The weeks I don’t have the will or the energy to think of the right prayers, they are already there on my tongue; the weeks I can’t speak at all, I am surrounded by the community of the faithful, all speaking words of life over me even if I can’t join in myself.
In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, we stand on the shoulders of giants; some weeks, it is enough to let the words of the many believers before me be what is carrying me closer to Christ.
The Creeds
The first week I attended an Anglican service, I cried during the Act of Contrition. The second week I attended, I cried again—at the creed.
The creed is another element that occurs every week. It’s the recitation of one of the most long-standing Christian statements of belief, the basic tenants of the Church. The most frequently recited one is called the Nicene Creed—I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth…
For someone who doesn’t cry in most religious settings, this was even more unexpected than the first time! The creed is… just a simple statement of belief. Every Christian professes this. But that’s the thing—every Christian professes this.
This hasn’t happened to me many times since, but in that moment, it hit me all at once that we were unified through this. These sentences, this profession of the Trinity, of the Resurrection, of the one, holy, catholic, & apostolic Church—these were what made Christianity what it was, what distinguished us from every other body of believers. Our Great Books curriculum was taking us through the middle ages and the Reformation. Division within the Church weighed heavily on my mind; it felt like there was so much to reconcile. On that Sunday morning, though, we said the words Christians have been reciting for millenia, unchanged—and my heart was overwhelmed with the absolute joy of being “of the same mind” as the Body of Christ.
Unity
The kind of “unity of mind” Paul talks about in his epistles is absolutely not limited to a group of people practicing the same liturgy, saying the same words, reciting the same creed every week. Paul himself puts forth the idea of the Body looking different, each body part working in a different way to build it up; whether you’re Baptist, Anglican, Orthodox, or Catholic, you have a vital role in building up the Body of Christ.
What I discovered at Church of the Vine, then, was not a unity that didn’t exist before—it was an expression of that unity that, through some divine mystery, made that unity feel real to me.
For the next year and a half of my life, that unity colored everything. Two dear friends of mine made the decision to join the Eastern Orthodox church; another became Catholic; on Sunday evenings, I joined two other close friends at their Foursqaure-rooted church in Portland. Inspired by our Great Books program’s visit to a nearby monastery, all of us began coming together early in the mornings before class to worship. We rose before the sun to read Psalms, sing hymns, and pray for one another.
Those months were some of the most formative, blessed times of my college experience. There isn’t enough space in a blog post to detail the ways Christ touched me in this time—but he was forming me, nudging me, helping me grow into directions I wasn’t even aware of yet.
Little did I know, things were about to get sticky.
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