important to be present with them, to be quiet with them, for a few min- utes every day. We are together at mealtimes, too,
but mealtimes also include con- versation, and conversation can be muddled with anger or cloaked with desire. Vespers is about unison, perhaps a
feigned or artifi cial unison, but uni- son nonetheless. We stand together and sit together, we sing together and speak words together and when a child remarks, “Mama, church is boring” during a moment of quiet prayer, we swing our heads in unison toward the sound and chuckle for the appropriate length of time. It is right to be suspicious of this
kind of unison. It is right to squint one’s eyes and think vaguely about soldiers marching in uniform lines under Hitler’s watchful eye. Unison of any sort requires a giving up of the self, at least for a brief moment in time, and of course it matters to what or whom one is giving oneself. Much of the white, educated,
middle-class in America has become very good at this kind of suspicion. Our knee-jerk reaction to organized religion is to mention cults and Kool- Aid and lemmings, to feel satisfi ed about our own intellectual superior- ity and to write “those people” off as stupid. I have thought all those things.
I like to talk about religion but the truth is that the actual practice of faith, the swelling of it in my heart, doesn’t come easily to me. I forget to pray and when I do I get distracted. In college I took a class on feminist theology but refused to go to daily chapel because they didn’t use inclu- sive language for God. It was easier to remain cynical of the church, to be smoking cigarettes in the shad- ows outside it, than to be inside and implicated.
To practice a religion is, in some
ways, to take responsibility for it. T is is why it’s easier to be spiritual than religious. You can pick and choose the things that make sense and feel right. You don’t have to deal with the idiots who still think God is a man, who still think marriage is just about men and women, who want to preach the tomb without resurrection, damnation instead of grace. Yes, following anything or anyone
(be that ideal religious, political, aes- thetic or romantic) without thought is silly and potentially disastrous. But so is hanging onto the intellect at the expense of participating in something that moves us beyond the borders of ourselves, that makes us vulnerable in ways that suspicion and cynicism do not allow. So although sometimes I fi nd
Vespers to be boring or pretentious or aesthetically suspect, I go every evening so that for 20 or 30 minutes of the day I can practice moving beyond myself. I go because I have made a promise to this community to attend. And I go because I love the space where we worship. T e VC, with its acid trip ceiling and altar standing just to the leſt of the free throw line, is the most real church I know.
Author bio: Schwehn is a visiting pro- fessor of English at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn., and the co-editor of Claim- ing Our Callings: Toward a
New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (Oxford University Press, 2014).
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