A
burgeoning concern of liturgical scholars and worship leaders has been to find
ways to emphasize the gift of creation and the joy God’s word expresses about
creatures and plants, water and earth itself. Scott Kershner explains here how
he helped lead a mountain community to more fully welcome nature into worship.
The full essay is available in Liturgy 33,
no. 4.
In
2010, I left eight years of parish ministry in Brooklyn, New York, to accept a
call as pastor at Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat in the North Cascade
mountains of Washington state. Surrounded at Holden by the Glacier Peak
Wilderness, I went from one of the most densely urban places to one of the most
remote sites in the continental United States. The challenge of pastoral
ministry in a wilderness threw matters of ecology and liturgy into bold relief.
The task of connecting liturgy and local ecology is a pastoral imperative in
every setting. Holden Village’s wilderness context allowed me, as a pastor, to
appreciate this urgency. . .
Holden
Village is located on the site of the company town of an abandoned copper mine,
given to the Lutheran Church in the early 1960s. Getting to this mountain
valley of stunning beauty requires a three-hour ferry ride up Lake Chelan, a
fjord-like fifty-mile-long body of water largely unmarked by human presence,
followed by a bumpy bus ride on an eleven-mile dead-end road into a
glacier-carved valley. As an intentional community and retreat center, Holden
is composed of the resident staff, volunteers, and guests who stay for days or
weeks. The institution is dedicated to learning, creativity, sustainability,
and the nurturance and renewal of the church. The community gathers every
evening for vespers (Evening Prayer) and shares Holy Communion every Sunday.
.
. . At Holden, it was not difficult to recognize the walls in which we gathered
as both necessary (especially in a place with an average winter
snowfall of twenty-five feet!) and a limitation to our liturgical
imaginations. Our attempts at breaking down those theological and ecological
walls were experiments in religare, the
Latin root of religion, to bind together. . .
Here
are some examples of how the worship at Holden Village came to attend to both
the liturgical calendar and the blessings of nature’s seasons at the same time.
Because
the shortening days of the Advent season were palpable to us as valley
dwellers, we reflected in vespers on Advent themes of darkness, waiting, and
hope. We worshiped outdoors in inky-dark evenings, with “pews” cut from banked
snow while singing Psalm 19 by candle and starlight. The Christmas proclamation
of the birth of the Light that shines in the darkness was a message of existential
promise. When we filed out of Christmas Eve candlelight worship, handheld
tapers were planted in snowbanks under a wheeling night sky as we sang, “Silent
night, holy night.” Epiphany worship included a great Christmas tree bonfire. .
.
Lent
sent us into the woods. I spread field guides around the circular hearth at the
center of our sanctuary and invited the community to collect cones during Lent
from each of the sixteen varieties of our native conifer neighbors. Some grew
nearby; others only at harsh elevations. As people hiked, skied, and
snow-shoed, cones of each of these species began to populate our worship space,
representing the forests our human community invited indoors to join the
liturgical celebration. We began to see these trees as co-participants in our
common worship and ourselves as faithful members of the land community beyond
our doors.
Scott M. Kershner, an ordained pastor
in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, serves as University Chaplain at
Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. He received a Pastor's
Study Grant for this research, funded by the Louisville Institute.
