The National Cathedral is shaken, and so am I

From Episcopal Cafe-

By Ellen Painter Dollar

I spent much of the final week of August in a vacation bubble, ignoring the bad news that showed up on my iGoogle news feed each morning. Instead, I pondered such vital questions as where my family should get our daily ice cream fix or which Cape Cod beach to explore. But one news story pierced my bubble and left me shaken—the photos of the National Cathedral, its spires decapitated, crooked, and cracked after the Virginia earthquake.

Twenty-one years ago, I arrived in D.C. after college graduation to be part of the Cathedral Volunteer Service Community (CVSC), a now-defunct program that provided housing, a small stipend, and a spiritual adviser to six young people every year. We shared a Cathedral-owned house on Woodley Road (which flanks the Cathedral’s north side) and worked full-time as volunteers for various urban ministry agencies.

In college, my primary community had been InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). At IVCF, I found the ease with which people talked about Jesus and their faith refreshing, after growing up in an Episcopal church where my faith walk was centered more on singing in the church choir than on exploring what it means to follow Jesus. Through IVCF, I learned to pray and to read the Bible, to claim Jesus as my savior, to explore how my faith intersected with daily life, and to love a rousing guitar-accompanied, hand-clapping praise song.

But my formative Episcopal childhood lingered. I could not embrace my IVCF friends’ positions on many social issues. Attending a nondenominational church decorated in shades of mauve with all the charm of a doctor’s waiting room, and where sermons took the form of plodding 45-minute “teachings,” I missed the structured liturgies, artful spaces, and poetic language of Episcopal worship. I was also seeking more guidance on how to model Jesus’ ministry with the poor, the sick, and the outcast. In my sheltered college world where “mission” involved mowing elderly people’s lawns and going to Fort Lauderdale over spring break to talk to drunk people about Jesus, there was little opportunity to explore Christian responses to poverty and related issues.

More here-

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/diocese_of_washington/the_national_cathedral_is_shak.php