Reflections on the Chapel of the Cross

Elizabeth Bluhm

One gray Sunday morning in December 1995, I woke up in my small bed-sit in West London with only 20 minutes until church started. The problem was that I did not have a church to go to. It had been hard to find a regular church, and Sunday mornings still brought a pang of loneliness. I picked up the A to Zed book of London, and chose the nearest church on the map.

After the service, black coffee was sold for 25 pence a cup, with some stale pastries. I stood by myself next to the coffee table, wearing an old shabby brown coat from a charity shop, washed in the bathtub. But within a few minutes, the young minister and several parishioners said hello to me, and everyone started to tell stories about former bed-sitting apartments when they cooked over a single burner. After almost six months spent looking for a church, I immediately felt I had found someplace I was welcome. I was a new college graduate on a Watson Fellowship and, while I could be assured that each day would bring something surprising, I was never sure of finding anything familiar and stable.

I doubt that I was the only nomadic twenty-something who was comforted upon walking into a church far from home. It is both exhilarating and wrenching to leave home and establish a new life somewhere. There are generally several stops between high school and where one finally puts down roots, including a small college town, work in a big city, graduate school at another university, and moving because of a spouse's career or family. It is easy to see what solace the church offers young adults caught up in this whirlwind. It is harder to know what contribution people in their twenties and thirties can offer to the church.

Joining a church at age 23 or 25, we are like the young Americans described in Robert Frost's short poem, “The Gift Outright.” Preoccupied by distant dreams and concerns, we do not sink our teeth into the place at hand. Just as Frost says, “the land was ours before we were the land's;” we have already been offered a place in the church. It was ours from the first day we set foot in the church, or perhaps even before that. Christ extends solace and forgiveness to everybody, even when our lives are in flux. The church community extends welcoming arms to newcomers. It is our hesitancy, at this age, which makes us hold back from joining in wholeheartedly, not knowing if we will stay for one year or a lifetime.

At age 30, I still don't know in which direction life will go next. I don't clearly know how to be involved in church stewardship in the meantime. But I have been encouraged by being a part of the Chapel of the Cross, and other Episcopal churches before this. I have loved hearing a group pray together to “do all such good works as Thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” I have admired how the Chapel of the Cross seizes opportunities to help adult Christians sort through social issues like war, and figure out how to incorporate Christ's teachings into our real lives. I think that,at this age, stewardship can involve contributing to everything that makes the church an arm of outreach to other people wandering through life and looking for comfort and shelter. That may be singing in the choir, talking to strangers at coffee hour, performing community service, or countless other acts that add up to the life of the church.