(10/15/15 3:06am)
It’s the here and now that’s important; the next life will sort itself out.
This is the conclusion I’ve come to in my ponderings on mortality and the afterlife, ponderings on which I imagine nearly all people dwell throughout their lives. I also imagine that many individuals in my demographic – educated millennials – have reached a similar conclusion to mine. If you are one of those individuals, this letter is for you.
My church, St. Stephen’s on the Green, has recently initiated a series of informal conversations around the topic of millennials in the Episcopal Church – or, more specifically: why aren’t there any? Episcopal congregations, and congregations of nearly every Christian denomination, are getting older and older, and very few millennials – those reaching young adulthood in the first decades of the twenty-first century – are stepping forward to carry on the traditions and teachings. Why is this so? Research suggests that it is not for a lack of spiritual need in the younger generation; rather, millennials statistically report greater spiritual need than their baby-boomer counterparts. It seems to me that the empty pew seats are a result of increased distrust of organized religion and of the Christian Church in particular.
This is a very good thing, I think, for the Church and for the collective enlightenment of humankind. Blind trust in any doctrine leads unavoidably to perversion of that doctrine’s moral pillars, as those in power know how easy it is to manipulate the blindly trusting. What is not so good is the blind distrust that I observe in my fellow millennials toward the Church.
I was one of those blindly distrustful, contentedly ignorant, non-practicing Christian millennials until a personal crisis four years ago led me to seek refuge in a non-denominational church sanctuary in New Haven, CT. I found the Episcopal Church a year later and have since become a student of the ways and beliefs of this particular denomination. Over time I have developed in the Episcopal Church a deep trust – not blind, but based on what I have observed, and restricted by my finite understanding of the institution. I have learned along the way that many of the assumptions that the contentedly ignorant me had about the Church were quite wrong.
For example, I thought that people went to church because they thought it would help them get into heaven. This was wrong to me on so many different levels. To start, I didn’t think of heaven as something you get into. I imagine this is a source of skepticism for many educated millennials, and so I endeavor now to put this one misconception to rest.
My time in the Episcopal Church has taught me that at least some practicing Christians don’t fit the stereotype I imagined four years ago. But it wasn’t until this past Sunday, in my pastor Susan’s sermon, that I finally heard this particular stereotype, and its origin, eloquently expressed:
“We cannot do anything to earn eternal life, like a commodity - neither by what we do, or I would say neither by what we believe. And I think the Church with a big ‘C’ and many churches continuing today have really failed in this message over the ages. The Church has said, 'Join us, believe this, get baptized, and you will have eternal life.' What we should have said instead, I think, is this: When you open yourself to Christ, you will be transformed by Grace to live a life of love. And, living a life of love, you will put fear behind you, and live life with love. And that is eternal life.”
This rang true to me; tears sprang from my eyes, and those sitting around me possibly heard me whisper, “That’s it!” Eternal life, that phrase we hear thrown around in Christian dialogue so often, isn’t about “getting into heaven.” It is perhaps clearer to think of eternal life not as life that goes on forever in a temporal sense but life that goes on for- ever in a spatial sense. A heart-soul extraphysical self that transcends boundary and restriction, that transcends fear.
It’s the here and now that’s important. The next life will sort itself out.
The Episcopal Church, for me, is a place of communion. Yes, communion means eating the Body and drinking the Blood of Christ, but more importantly for me, it means community, a word more readily understood in the secular world than communion is. St. Stephen’s is a place where I can be in a living dia- logue with the spiritual ideas of the past three millennia, where I can exchange ideas with friends and spiritual think- ers whom I’ve grown to trust, where I can keep my own spirituality living and growing. And it is flourishing.
So my challenge to you, educated millennial, is this: examine your distrust, identify that which is blind and go looking. Perhaps you'll find a community that satisfies your spiritual need in abundance, as I have.
(04/08/15 11:17pm)
The first half of the Theatre Department’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls this past weekend was a welcome treat – a delightfully original weave of fairytale whimsy and post-Soviet Russian grit. Katie Weatherseed’s portrayal of Annie, the show’s naive and relatable Russian-American study-abroad protagonist, and Gabrielle Owens’ laughably hideous Baba Yaga offered a much longed-for respite from the edge and violation of Snoo Wilson, Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker, favorite playwrights of the Middlebury Theatre Department.
Unfortunately, though, Fairytale Lives was not completely free of inappropriate and unnecessary violation. I did not see the second half of the show, opting to preserve my lungs instead.
About halfway through the show, Weatherseed and Lana Meyer, who played Masha, a young Moscow woman with domestic issues (to say the least), played a dialogue in which Masha offers Annie a cigarette. Masha lit up first, then helped the neophyte Annie with hers. By the time Annie was choking on her first lungful, the smoke had wafted to my seat. I have severe chemical sensitivities due to an autoimmune disorder, so when I realized that these were not herbal cigarettes but the real thing, tar and all, I quietly excused myself from my row and left the theater.
Using real, lit cigarettes in College-sponsored shows is wrong on several levels – not only does it pose a health risk to actors and audience members alike, but it is an ineffective directorial choice given the intense cultural connotations cigarettes hold. Health, though, is my most significant reason for calling for an end to the use of real cigarettes in Middlebury theatrical productions.
From the actor’s viewpoint, smoking is a personal choice. We have a significant number of student smokers involved in the Theatre Department, and that is another issue entirely. But a student should never – never – feel pressure from a faculty member to smoke a cigarette in a play. It should simply not be part of the equation, should not enter the director-actor conversation. Professors should not be promoting smoking, even as part of character-building; actors have been known to develop nicotine addictions from situations just like this. True, the actor does have the ability to say no to her director, but in the Middlebury Theatre Department, as in the greater world of theatre, saying no to your director can often feel like risky business. It is easy to imagine an actor going along with a director’s decision to light real cigarettes despite the actor’s inner misgivings. Because of this, I would view such a request from a director as a breach of trust.
I should note here that I do not know the specific circumstances surrounding the decision to light real cigarettes in Fairytale Lives; it is possible that the actors involved were already smokers and even initiated the decision. However, the issue involves many more people than just the actors and director.
From the audience’s viewpoint, secondhand smoke is not a personal choice. It is an imposition, a violation of the body, which is one reason why smoking is banned inside College buildings and within 25 feet of doors and windows. It is very unhealthy for any audience member who must be subject to the cloud filling the room, and even more so for the fellow actors and stagehands who must be exposed to the smoke night after night. During rehearsals for my First Year Show, (a Theatre Department-sponsored play produced every fall in which students who are new to the Department participate) I had to ask my director to refrain from including real, lit cigarettes in a scene that I was not in. Such action was necessary for my health and necessary to enable my brother, who has a similar autoimmune condition, to come see the show.
I foolishly interpreted the printed warnings that Fairytale Lives would include smoking to mean that smoking was to be portrayed onstage, similar to previous Department warnings about shows’ sexual content. If I had known that smoking was actually going to happen onstage, I would not have bought a ticket. I wonder how many others would have done the same, and I wonder how many others reacted negatively to the cigarette smoke. My guess is quite a few, at least regarding the latter.
So why the decision to use real smoke in the first place? Because it looks more realistic than prop cigarettes or herbal smoke? It does, but at too high a cost. Realistic theatre (which Fairytale Lives isn’t) seeks realism in small details in an effort to facilitate the audience’s suspension of disbelief, to help the viewer lose himself in the story more completely. Using real, lit cigarettes, though, has the opposite effect. As soon as the smoke reaches the audience’s nostrils, the audience is immediately pulled out of the play, as thoughts such as “they actually made those poor actors smoke real cigarettes” or “isn’t that breaking some kind of law?” or even “wow, that’s awesome that they’re allowed to do that!” impede engagement with the plot. The scene becomes about the cigarettes instead of the characters smoking them. Prop cigarettes are well within the limits of an average audience’s suspension of disbelief, and, since they pose no real threat to anyone, they allow the audience to engage with the cigarettes on the characters’ terms.
At the end of the show’s second scene, Weatherseed’s character, smothered in a giant fur coat, about to embark on a journey to the homeland she’d never known, shot the audience a glance filled with palpable emotion – fear, excitement, duty, confusion, determination – and the stage went dark. I was ready then to applaud the new direction I saw the Theatre Department going in (a trend that began last semester with the uproariously funny Mendel, Inc.). No longer, it seemed, did the department only cater to those longing to be insulted, hurt or violated by their theatre. It seemed a new theatre was finding representation on Middlebury’s stages, a theatre for seekers of a more respectful, real humanity. But then the smoke came.
Jack DesBois '15 is from Topsfield, Massachusetts.