Spencer’s Farewell
Dear Christ Church Westerly,
The year as a seminarian in Westerly, Rhode Island, has come to an end, but I can still hear my name being prayed for at the services. The sound of my name being read out over the congregation never ceased to surprise me. It went to my heart. “Spencer” echoing up behind the rood screen, cast a spell, blessing me each week, whether I was alert or bleary-eyed, following the liturgical choreography or not. I carry the sound of the congregation with me in my nervous system.
In seminary this year, we studied the letters of Paul, and in the early letters, Paul makes much of referring to his new Christian movement as being a body, each member of the body is crucial, the head needs the heart, the ear needs the eye. The image works for me: organic, fluid, once a human being has been knitted together with sinews and ligaments it is undo. The image underscores the importance of health: without our health, whether we are secular or religious, is primary. Health blesses us as we put our two feet outside our beds in the morning. Later, after Paul died, the letters attributed to Paul get caught up in something called “household codes,” and much is made of what we should wear, who should speak. Once one reads over these later letters you can feel a rigidness enter the language, corset strings being tightened over the paragraphs. The images of wet clay, a race being run, a tree growing are gone. One feels dusty rule books gathering on shelves. The image of a body binds more than that of a house, nerve endings and blood bind more than architecture.
When I was working among you in Westerly, I felt the image of the body of Christ manifesting itself. I will not remember what we wore. I find the Christian experience tactile. Inside the old granite structure, behind stained glass windows of deep greens and reds, our breathing completes Christ Church. The pale cream glass Christ above the altar shined bright when Natalie Lawton shook my hand after the services. The dark wooden pews were more bright when Ellen Dodge laughed.
I left you on a bright, beautiful, breezy April day in Westerly. The waters in the rivers had receded. The birds sang in the whiteness of the Bartlett pear trees. The sun shone over the small shops, the bank, the library, the park. I thought about all the people there who had welcomed me. I thought of Father Chris’ twinkling eye as our watches read 4:56 on Saturday evening and he turned to me and said, “Well we don’t have an acolyte or a first reader, you can do that right.” Right.
The kind word, the laugh, the handshake, these things linger. Touch and gesture are the gifts emanating from one human body to another, and perhaps as Paul pulled up the stakes for his tents, and traveled from Galatia to Philippi, perhaps tired himself of the nomadic life, believing in his mission since he had been improbably struck by God’s voice on a dirty road, this is what impressed him most; the fragile, miraculous thing called a human being. For me, the life of faith is not about the constrictions of rules we find in First Timothy, Ephesians or Colossians, but the wide-eyed messy language of Galatians, where Paul can barely control himself; the unexpected moment, the surprisingly tight handshake of Natalie Lawton, the generous smile of Ellen Dodge, the kindness of Father Chris, with these, indeed, I push on, driving down the road, past New Haven and on to Saint Luke’s in the Field, in Greenwich Village, where I will serve next fall. I am a part of something now. Christ Church made that more so.
Blessings,
Spencer Reece
