Vespers I
The most real church I know 34
www.thelutheran.org
SHUTTERSTOCK By Kaethe Schwehn
Editor’s note: Tis excerpt is reprinted with permission from Tailings: A Mem- oir (Cascade Books, 2014), Schwehn’s record of a year as a 20-something coming to terms with her floundering faith and emerging sense of vocation while living with 70 other people at Holden Village, a remote, intentional ELCA-affiliated Christian community near Chelan, Wash.
n the summer the Village Center (or VC) fills up with bodies and singing and clapping and breath. Te Vil- lage Center is actually a large gymnasium and was used
as such during the mining days. We still use it for the occasional game of soccer or basketball in the winter, but mostly it’s used during the summer as the main worship space.
In 1976, Richard Caemmerer painted the ceiling. Tis result is not a Sistine
Chapel look-alike. Tere are no typical biblical images, no lions cozied to lambs, no angels with hearkening smiles, no fishermen casting their nets into turbulent seas; instead, the ceiling looks like a liturgical acid trip. Bold swaths of color swirl and divide and sometimes manifest into recognizable images: a trout, a star, a snowflake, an egg. Tough I have been staring at that ceiling every summer for 22 years, I
can barely describe it. I could never sketch it. It’s shiſty and mysterious and jubilant and disturbing.
Just below the west side of the
ceiling, above the stage (used for mediocre theatrical events for over 80 years) large oak letters spell out: “God Gives Seasons for Gladness of Heart.” Te entire village, regardless of
actual religious belief, shows up for Vespers every night. Vespers is one of the monastic hours, the one that comes at evening time, when day is turning to dusk. Sometimes other monastic services are held, like Mat- ins (morning) or Compline (night) but Vespers is the only service cel- ebrated daily. And attending Vespers is a
requirement of the Holden Village community. You show up, whether God is your thing or not, because it matters to have everyone present and together for a portion of each day. It matters not because everyone needs to rehearse a particular dogma together, but because when you live this closely to so many others, it is
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