The Benefits of an Episcopal School
Gardner Academy – Why An Episcopal School? by Max Wooley
The question is, in the founding of a private school for the Methow Valley, why should it have a religious affiliation at all, and why should it be Episcopalian?
Nothing is experienced without a story
Individuals and communities relate to the world through stories. These can be good stories or bad. They can be stories of dominion, of race, of resource extraction, they can be stories of scientific discovery, of empirical observation, or of testing theories, or they can be stories of chivalry, of deference to the poor, of a world whose creatures express their own consciousness or mystery. No community or individual is really unaffiliated, because no human exists without relating to the world through a set of stories. What makes our contemporary culture different from others is that we can sometimes think we experience the world without stories, that scientific advancement means we have a bare comprehension of things in themselves. But this is a double mistake. We end up experiencing the world through a set of stories about which we are not careful or deliberate —consumerism, social media, even populist interpretations of the sciences. It also robs us of fully living into the mysterious interactions we have with all the things we meet in the world. (David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous). In other words, a tree is just a tree, it is just populus tremuloides, it doesn’t rhyme with symbolic trees from the stories we read or remember. We close ourselves off to the mysteries that it might express to us in the quaking of its leaves, in its bearing of fruit, in its refracting of emerald light. And so we cut it down even before we turn on the chainsaw.
Stories and Cyclical Causation
The advantage of religious affiliation is that we deliberately choose a set of stories where we can begin to interpret the world. The advantage of the Episcopal set of stories is that they are sacramental. In other words, they don’t constrict truth to a single interpretation of the written word, but, rather, they affirm the physical world as a place of ongoing revelation. The world itself is a place of living symbols where all that exists is a mysterious expression of the divine imagination. Truth resides in the flesh of the world, and so education and formation become about shaping humans and communities to rightly and justly relate with the divine depth of the world.
Canadian Poet Robert Bringhurst identifies cyclical causality in Haida oral poetry. He points out that over thousands of years, the Haida oral tradition was drawn from the environment which the Haida inhabited, and of which they were community members (community/ecology). They stories they told shaped their community, in turn, to be a positive ecological component, contributing to and sustaining the other members of the ecological community all of whom were co-dependant on one another —the cedar trees, the dogfish, the salmon, the mussels, and the seabirds. Being deliberate about what stories we tell allows us to listen to the world’s self-revelation, it allows the world to shape us so we can tell stories, in turn, that forms our children to be positive members of the ecological community.
Cyclical Causality and our Medieval Heritage
Contemporary Christianity is often interpreted, and perhaps rightly so, as telling stories that create divisions among humans, and cast the natural world not only as a separate realm, but also as an inferior realm of resource extraction. But the Episcopal/Anglican tradition, as a descendant of the medieval worldview, places the gospels and the rituals of the church in a system of formation that is more similar to the cyclical causality of the Haida oral traditions than to any contemporary stories —religious or secular. This can be seen in the founding of some of the earliest university schools in the west. The monastic schools of Paris and later of the Franciscan order generally saw education as the work of healing human relationships with the world. Their role was to advance a specific formation of their students that healed their affect –their emotional, human relationship with the created order. For them, the role of education was to make future nobles into positive ecological components of both the social and spiritual ecologies (communities) of their world. And for the medievals, all ecology was spiritual. The world, filled with violence and suffering, could be seen anew through the “spectacles of the incarnation” —the healing vision of Christ. Nature was scripture “written by the finger of God,” and it was the work of the church to help humans see the world once again as God imagined it –to pull the faithful back through the wardrobe so they could see the world for the Eden that it had always been.
The Episcopal tradition is a system of stories and rituals that proclaims that:
The world and all its inhabitants are good.
That humans, made in their creator’s image, can either positively or negatively shape the world.
That everything created is a living form of the divine imagination, i.e. a tree expresses a certain mysterious treeness in God, a trout something speckled and slippery, a river something refreshing and flowing, a child something precocious and wondering, or a swamp something infested with life and greenness about God.
That the world is broken, filled with violence and oppression, but that some humans are working to reveal the deeper magic of the world through the stories of the gospel and the ritual of the holy eucharist, and that ultimately that deeper magic will prevail.
That the mystery of the world is revealed in self-offering love. In other words, creation exists because the innermost identity of the divine nature is to give outside of himself, and that when humans respond in kind, they participate in the creation of the world (cyclical ecology).
Question & Answer
Does Episcopal affiliation mean that students will have to be Episcopalian?
No. Most students at Episcopal Schools are not Episcopalian, but these schools were and remain popular, especially on the east coast, because they guarantee a certain educational breadth. Historically this breadth fits the idea of the renaissance man. Students aren’t indoctrinated with specific religious dogma, but learn to live, study, work, play, and serve within a deliberate framework and set of stories. That framework includes the sciences and math, mastery and understanding of art and music, and the stories and symbols of the humanities that grant navigational richness to the world. Given the church’s unofficial position as the established church, inherited from its predecessor, the Church of England, Episcopal culture is not about tribal loyalty, but about participating in, if not often shaping, the state and the community. More presidents and senators have been affiliated in some way with the Episcopal Church than any other denomination.
Will Students be expected to assent to Christian doctrine?
No. Firstly, the Episcopal tradition tends to prefer ritual participation and service as a sign of faith rather than intellectual assent to certain dogmatic statements. But, secondly, as David Foster Wallace said: “There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” (Wallace, This is Water).
Episcopal worship provides a deliberate structure for that worship rather than the undeliberate but equally religious worship we see in contemporary culture. To be more specific, this looks like celebrity worship, worship of body image, money, status, material comfort, and individuality. Episcopal worship, which is essentially reformed medieval ritual, places emphasis on a communal, not individual, relationship with the divine through art, ritual, and music.
Will Students be expected to engage in Christian worship?
Yes. As said above, Episcopal worship emphasizes communal participation in liturgy. This means the emphasis on what is holy is physical, not intellectual. Human bodies go through certain motions, kneeling, crossing, they hear beautiful music, they see the way light is refracted through colored glass, they smell incense, and they eat bread and wine that has been ritually blessed by men and women robed in a sort of hallowed camouflage. Sacramental worship attests to the holiness of our world. It shows that God is in our world and not in some separate era of future or past or in a separate dimension of heaven or hell. It shows that the world we live in is holy, and it requires that we both acknowledge and cultivate its beauty and holiness.
Is it ethical to ask people to worship against what they will? In other words, is it OK for people to participate in worship when they don’t intellectually assent to associated doctrine?
Worship in any ancient tradition is a set of physical acts where human communities relate to their direct human and ecological environment through a framework of myths and stories. Most modern Christian worship is not worship in this sense, but repetitive displays of individual assent to simplistic dogmatic statements. As said above, the Episcopal tradition does not place heavy emphasis on intellectual assent to dogma. The dogma is there as an important scaffold, but the meat of the faith is the liturgy, which exists between the words and scaffolding. Participating in Episcopal liturgy is more like swimming in the Methow river, or walking through the aspens of Lewis Butte in spring, overwhelmed by the soft clacking of the leaves, the smell of the lupine, the white glint of the snow on distant mountain peaks. It’s more like skiing down from the pass as a winter storm begins to hit, or picking and eating morels after wildfire has passed through the forest. Humans, especially humans in the Methow, already engage in the cyclical rituals of the seasons. These seasonal cycles generally gave way to religious rituals in most ancient traditions. To engage in Episcopal worship is to engage in a deliberate interpretation of the earth’s seasonal and spiritual cycles.