Radically Traditional
Nearly every morning, I don a black “sarum” cassock—a long robe with ancient ties that distinguishes a member of the clergy and one that makes me look a bit like either Neo from The Matrix, or Snape from the Harry Potter series, or Kylo Ren from Star Wars. And many of those mornings I think of something Eddy once said: “I still don’t understand Chuck becoming an Episcopalian. He was so counter-cultural…”
Eddy was my youth pastor growing up, a mentor and friend. He taught me to skateboard and surf and also served to incubate my Christian spirituality, often through talks on the long drive to and from the beach from our hometown of Pine Hills, just outside Orlando, Florida. I first met Eddy when I was like seven years old and he was a seminary student hanging out in the church library where I liked to play whenever I had to come to work with my mom (she was the financial secretary for our Baptist church). In my later teenage years, Eddy served to help direct my rebellious tendencies into something good and godly.
I’ve written about this recently, but I discovered skateboarding the summer before my eighth grade year and punk rock alongside that. This awakened a fairly dormant rebellious streak that had me challenging authority and cultural norms and, much later, the “sacred cows” of my Baptist church. As a child of the nineties, I disdained hypocrisy and sought authenticity. I embraced Jesus’ words directed at the Pharisees:
You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy about you, by saying: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ (Matthew 15:7-9 NASB)
Eventually, a sexual abuse scandal rocked our church and then ramped all this way up. The scandal came on the heels of two significant antecedent events: the firing of my high school English teacher and the ongoing attempts to suppress our church youth group—both things instigated by key members of the church community. My English teacher was very much into art and opening people’s minds and her assigning of the book Flowers for Algernon to middle school students royally pissed off some people (especially the home-school sect that saw this as evidence that even “Christian” education was going to “corrupt” their kids). She refused to apologize and so was fired. My church youth group was deeply scrutinized from the get-go because we had a more rock-oriented praise band, and this in the midst of the notorious “Worship Wars” of late-90s evangelicalism.
And so, I was exposed to the use of reason and critical thinking. I battled the more cult-like elements of my deeply conservative church. All of this resulting in me becoming a bit like a Silicon Valley type, embracing disruption and reinvention under the guise of my own arrogance and still-budding intelligence.
I created and led a Bible study (called Splinter) at a skate park. I had a whole entourage of misfit kids that loaded into my truck to skate and surf and play loud music. We all debated and argued about what was “essential” to being Christian all in service of exposing the shaky foundations of our parents’ ideas about the Church that wound up leading to lies, hypocrisy, and the active covering up of multiple sexual abuse scandals in order to maintain a certain status quo.
So, yeah, Eddy was right. I was “counter-cultural.”
Eddy had said this to my friend Maria and her counter was: “if you know Chuck so well then you’d see that this is exactly like him and is itself counter-cultural.”
See, here’s the thing I learned: embracing a tradition is itself counter-cultural. But I also learned that, almost without fail, the sorts of folks who refuse to submit to a tradition—those disruptive types—all wind up being exposed as abusers or sex-pests; exploitative and borderline narcissistic people. Because they feel that if “the rules” are “made-up” then those rules don’t apply, resulting in people who become a sort of rule to themselves and wind up living indulgent lives that hurt many people.
***
A lot changed for me when I walked into the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida as worshiper for the first time.
I had been struggling for many years with church. I read from the Bible nearly daily and still considered myself Christian. But after watching back-to-back pastors at my childhood church leave because they couldn’t stop exploiting vulnerable women in the congregation for sexual purposes, I had a hard time trusting pastors and even church communities.
Too many churches are built on the personalities of their pastors. In fact, this is often reinforced architecturally. The more Calvinist/Zwinglian-informed churches of the Protestant Reformation placed nigh sacramental importance on preaching and so altars were moved to being in front of and below soaring pulpits that served as the focal point of church buildings, so placed in order to maximize the acoustics for preaching in a world before microphones. Traditional churches placed pulpits (if they had them at all) off to the side, because sermons (if they were even delivered) were seen as being in service of the celebration of the Mass (Holy Eucharist/Communion).
Even when I was a regular church-goer, I saw the whole thing as a kind of facade. “Church” was a production and excuse to see my friends. Real worship happened in small Bible study and prayer groups. Because of this, the worship space of the church didn’t really matter. It was to be practical, above all else. Adorning a church with things like art seemed like a waste of time and money. I wasn’t opposed to art (I spent a summer worshiping at a small up-start church called “Journey” that had little community-theater-like skits right before the sermon that I thought was really cool at the time), but I felt that ornate church buildings were opulent and indulgent. I mean, my church was my high school gymnasium. The floor under my feet was a very nice basketball court, covered in rubber mats. I had PE and lunch in that same space on Monday through Friday.
Don’t get me wrong. I saw the beauty of ornate church buildings. My first serious girlfriend was Roman Catholic and even though I had qualms about worshiping at her parish, I couldn’t deny the beauty of stained glass windows and gothic arches. But, to my mind, these were off-limits or akin to museums. Serious houses of worship were industrial buildings with exposed ceilings painted black.
I’d visited Bethesda-by-the-Sea a few times during my freshman year of university. It is a stand-out beautiful building that many people think dates to the 1500s. During the day, the doors of the church were open. The grounds consist of cloistered walkways and English-style gardens. At the time, the church offered the only free parking near one of the beaches where I surfed, and so I’d park to surf and then sit in the quiet of the gothic space or the gardens after drying off.
It was a different girlfriend that had suggested we try worshiping at Bethesda. The idea was an absolute epiphany and immediately engaged my rebellious streak. What could be more counter to the sort of evangelicalism I had grown up in than to worship in an ornate gothic church with stained glass windows, clergy in robes, singing dusty old hymns with an organ-backed choir, and populated by some of the wealthiest people in the world?
Those old money, country-club folks wound up absolutely embracing me, a bicycle-riding, torn jeans and thrift-store-blazer-wearing kid with a faux-hawk and a lip piercing. I actually became excited about going to church, and was confirmed as an Episcopalian only three months after my first ever service.
What did it was the tradition.
I came to find that there was freedom in submitting to a tradition, to embracing the fact that others had long-ago asked many of the same questions about the church and had fought the same battles I had. There was no need to reinvent something that had already been reinvented many times before. Further, I found that submitting to a tradition was good for my soul.
When I was drifting aimlessly among the flotsam of an imploded evangelicalism, I was disruptively trying to construct a Christianity free from the hypocritical bullshit rules—those “commandments of men” that Isaiah and Jesus spoke of. But, as I said a moment ago, I began to find that as the “bullshit” rules didn’t apply to me, other rules didn’t either. And I began to start down the path of so many before me.
I honestly believe that, had I not discovered the apostolic traditions as enshrined in the Episcopal Church, I very well might be one of those guys you read about online. Another evangelical caught in a scandal of his own making.
Sara Miles, in her book Take This Bread (about her sudden conversion to Christianity through the Episcopal Church), writes of wearing vestments as a Eucharistic server. She says that putting on those funny robes reminded her of her days as a chef and that there was a sort of suppressing of the ego that comes with that: “the uniform changed me from an individual, with my own tedious history, to a ritual figure, one of millions of restaurant workers, with a time-honored and predictable role.”
People often ask me why I insist on wearing what I wear. Aren’t you hot in that? is the most common form of this. I once had a parishioner passive-aggressively comment on my preference for full vestments at holy communion with “when we’d do this service with the previous rector, he’d often just wear a stole over his plain clothes. So don’t feel obligated to fully vest for our small mid-week service.”
My reply to her: “One wears white tie to dine with the Queen. Therefore, I believe I should wear the chasuble when dining with God.”
I wear a cassock for two reasons: one, I can have a t-shirt and shorts on underneath while still looking like a priest. Two, it corrects for my ego. I am stepping into a role, a life, into which I have been ordained. It reminds me that, as a Christian, “it is no longer I that lives, but Christ who lives in me.”
The cassock is meant to be uncomfortable. This is because the ordained life, like the Christian life at large, is not comfortable. I am marked as someone who lives a particular kind of Christian life, one that is bigger than my ego and individuality. The ego and the over-emphasis on “individuality” has not done us a service as a people. Our world has become subject to a cacophonous noise of colliding egos, almost like a kind of static. As a sinner, left to my own devices, my ego would lead me to places that both leave me empty and cause lots of pain to others. This is true of all of us.
Submitting to a tradition, the Tradition, frees us from that chaos. It provides the right amount of boundary in order for our individuality to bloom, but not take over. Tradition prunes us and allows us to thrive. Our culture is one of narcissistic noise where many individuals are disruptively reinventing the world. When everyone sees themselves as “counter-cultural” then no one is counter-cultural—what they are is, simply, the culture. If rejecting tradition is the norm then embracing it is something radical.
A Christianity that understands itself as traditional goes against the flow of the dominant culture. Therefore, it is rebellious. It is counter to the culture.
Eddy was right. He just didn’t know it at the time.
The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.