A Liturgical Memoir: Why Do You Worship the Way You Do?

A photo of Garrett Memorial Chapel on Keuka Lake, New York.

Recently I was asked in one of my seminary classes to reflect on why I think of worship in the way that I do—and to figure out what exactly I do think of worship (which is ongoing). The prompt was:

In 750-1000 words, write a liturgical autobiography/ritual memoir that focuses upon the cultural, familial, spiritual/theological, and ritual formative experiences that have shaped your understandings and practices of worship.

So much of my Christian experience has been doing and believing what others told me to do and believe. From Sunday school to confirmation, I got plenty of Jesus spoon-fed to me in between handfuls of goldfish. During college, as I wrote my book, and in the midst of another year of seminary classes, taking time to reflect on the things I’ve always taken for granted—the ideas, beliefs, and practices that were handed down to me—has been essential in my process of reclaiming my own faith as a liberating one. If you’re like me and have been so busy doing too many things—even during a pandemic—chances are you haven’t made the time to reflect on why you believe what you believe and why you worship the way you worship—I didn’t. Here’s a bit of my ritual memoir with the hope that it opens memories and thought processes of your own and invites you to write your own liturgical autobiography.

Playing Church

            When I was about five or six years old my younger brother and I loved to play church. It’s not the most typical childhood game, and we took it quite seriously. After school we would run toward the back yard of our house on Main St. in small-town America and set ourselves the task of creating our very own chapel. There was a little clearing in the weeds behind the old wooden shed and this became our holy playground. We collected sticks to tie together for a cross, begged our mom when we saw those wonderfully uncomfortable plastic children’s chairs outside the grocery store, poured Welch’s grape juice (as good Methodists) into a plastic cup, and “borrowed” a stack of saltines. Finally, we were ready to have our first service, and our mom and stuffed animals filled the seats. As cars distantly whooshed by on the other side of the house, and Mennonite buggies clipped and clopped along their way, my younger brother led our very serious procession, carrying the stick-and-twine cross and placing it in the weeds at the front of our chapel. I followed behind, walking with the painfully slow pace of the clergy we watched at the ecumenical (though predominantly Episcopalian) chapel we attended every summer. With the cup of grape juice and a few saltines in my hand, I invited the congregation to be seated, and after some opening remarks invited them to come forward and receive communion. Doing church was my favorite activity.

A Closer Look

            As I reflect on my childhood and those memories of playing church with my younger brother, I still feel a sense of great anticipation and wonder at the beauty of ritual. When we first moved to rural upstate New York from Ft. Lauderdale, FL, we moved into the cottage that my family used to vacation at every summer. Garrett Memorial Chapel, a 1930s stone chapel, which is located just up the hill from our cottage, became our family’s spiritual home in the summers; it’s also where my parents were married, where my oldest sister was married, and where my older brother proposed to his wife. Family and religious experience were intimately interconnected in this place, and the chapel continues to be a physical reminder of those summers passed where all six of my siblings and I were home together.

The chapel is styled after a Medieval Scottish chapel and played a large role in curating my ritual experiences and expectations as a child and as an adult. The cold dark stone walls of the sanctuary provided an austere but exciting setting for worship on many warm summer mornings. The solemnity of the space, reinforced by the solemnity of the Episcopalian liturgy, is most likely what still informs my deep affection for formal worship: a procession (with a cross-bearer who was typically one of my many siblings or me), a painfully—but reverently—slow clergy person, a strict and almost always identical Eucharistic liturgy, and a recessional hymn that brought the mystical wonder of the worship experience to an end for the day. This space and the Episcopalian liturgy were deeply foundational for my liturgical upbringing and remain important for familial reasons as well. My United Methodist home church, which we all attended every darn Sunday—except in the summer—was instrumental in my cultural and theological formation as well as in my familial understanding of church.

Family Church/Church Family

The purple stone steeple of Penn Yan UMC, just a block down the road from our house and on the corner of Main St. U.S.A. and Chapel St., rises high above the Episcopal church across the street, the kitty-corner 60’s style Presbyterian church, and the old brick Baptist church down the road. In this family-full United Methodist church, I sang in the children’s choir, attended Sunday School where my older siblings were some of our teachers, ate goldfish during coffee hour, and attempted to cook spaghetti with other teenagers for our youth group fundraisers. It was here that church became more—and less—than the wonderfully mystical Sunday morning experience. Worship was stripped down and the family service happened in the airconditioned Fellowship Hall with stage lights and sound systems. People drank coffee in their folding metal chairs as the contemporary band sang “Jesus is the rock and he rolls my blues away… bop shoo bop.” Here, where silence was sparse and children were plentiful; the church was a family. Worship led into coffee hour and Sunday School while our parents attended bible study and the older matriarchs and patriarchs of the church entered in their best suits and dresses for the traditional service as the loud sounds of the gigantic pipe organ in the three-hundred-person sanctuary found its way into our Sunday school classrooms before the teacher, a retired teacher from the local elementary school, asked my older sixteen-year-old sister (her “teaching helper”) to close the window.

            This constant motion and hubbub of blue- and white-collar families doing life together in small town U.S.A. was the culture of my United Methodist bringing. This upbringing has a lot to unpack theologically, certainly more than 1,000 words will allow. For now, one brief observation will have to do. Growing up in this church ingrained in me a theology that was heavily influenced by the small town American culture it existed in: Jesus loved all of us, wanted us all to get along so we could go along, wanted us to show up at the Chicken BBQ and help out at the food pantry. This was the respectable Jesus, the family Jesus that we worshipped. I’m thankful for him, and I’m thankful to have gone away to New York City for college where this Jesus was placed on a shelf alongside my other home town memorabilia while I encountered the feminist, queer-affirming, socialist Jesus in the hand-holding trans couples on the north lawn of my new home, Sarah Lawrence College.