Chelsea Boes: Beginning as an infant in knowledge while growing in Anglican faith
On my way home from the annual Anglican women’s retreat last week, I got stuck behind the end of the Black Mountain Christmas parade. After 10 minutes, I pulled a bag of candy cane kisses from my backpack and started to eat with abandon. I watched as a procession of what appeared to be Newfoundland dogs loitered by, followed by stray band members and people on floats.
This is Christmas, I thought. And I’m the baby.
Let me explain.
Our family shuffled into West Asheville’s Redeemer Anglican Church one evening last fall after moving to the area. Though we’ve spent our whole lives in church, this service was all new to us — the tactility, historicity, thick smell of incense, kneeling for prayer, bowing to the cross as it processed down the aisle. “I hear bells!” my then-3-year-old cried in astonishment. “Look! The cross! The cross is moving!”
This Sunday, I’ll be confirmed as an Anglican at Redeemer. After a near-lifetime of expert-level Baptistness, I’m a novice again. Do my Baptist forebears cry out in my brain in alarm? Why yes. Yes they do. Yet I persist. Or more accurately, I keep blissfully floating down the Anglican river that I fell into one day while trying to dip in a mere experimental toe.
We came to Redeemer just before last Advent season. Within a few weeks, I was called upstairs into the kids’ classroom during the service to help my hard-to-manage younger kid get through the lesson. The teacher set out a wreath with five candles: three purples and one pink encircling the final candle, the white Christ candle. Did you know the candle for each of the five weeks stands for part of Christ’s nativity story? I did not. I, perhaps more than all the toddlers present, needed this lesson in church history complete with the wooden figurines the teacher used to show the Holy Family’s journey.
In churches past, I’ve taken scrupulous notes, read systematic theologies, quibbled over doctrines large and small, and divided into sequestered camps of conviction and bylaws. But I’ve spent the past year learning Anglicanism not just with my brain but with my kneeling legs, my incense-filled nose, my ears ringing with bells and reverberating with liturgy the Christian church has repeated for centuries. Anglicanism is not a treatise to be examined. It’s a life to be formed by. You learn it by doing it. It unfolds slowly. And you have to start as a baby.
I was certainly an infant in knowledge at this year’s women’s retreat. In a session called “Our Anglican Bodies,” the speaker stood upright at the podium telling us how after losing hope in the evangelical church, she knelt at Redeemer during prayer and wept “because her body was finally agreeing with what she was saying.” She then taught us motion by motion what occurs in an Anglican service (bowing during the Nicene Creed, standing when the gospel is read, kneeling during confession, making the sign of the cross when the Trinity is mentioned, etc.). I tend to think of “going through the motions” as a bad thing. But what if the motions have existed all along to remind my body of what I actually believe?
Advent, it turns out, is all about the last posture mentioned in her talk: sitting still. Waiting for God. During Advent, apparently, Anglicans also clean their houses. They nest as if expecting a baby, which, of course, they are. They “rediscover their own wealth” by sorting through boxes. This defies the typical attitude of holiday rush and spending, and can be learned even from the loudspeaker at Ingles: “Let every heart prepare Him room,” croons Nat King Cole, Pentatonix, Celtic Woman, and everybody else. We don’t make room by bringing more stuff in. We make room by taking stuff out. How will I join in? With the bottle of lavender Mrs. Myers all-purpose cleaner I got at Hopey & Co. for half price in the fall?
Cleaning I can do. But who knows how to wait? Sitting behind the standstill parade traffic, I chuckled as I remembered my husband saying, “The retreat costs $150? You’d better have a spiritual experience.” I gave him an affectionate kick in the pants and replied, like an Anglican, “All my experiences are spiritual.”
Unlike an Anglican, I finally U-turned. I wended my way home on Interstate 40 East through a fog as thick and blinding as cotton. The whole world was going to bed under this blanket for Advent. Crawling in to sleep.
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Chelsea Boes lives in Old Fort and works as editor of WORLDkids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Boes: Having the faith of a child during this Advent season
