On a Sunday Night

Stepping into a darkness hazy with incense, cut by the flickering of candles framing the altar, a rich silence greets the people arriving at Christ Church for Sunday evening Compline services. As people filter down the aisle and take their seats they experience something beautiful, something that isn’t seen in classrooms or dining halls or dorms. Streetlight illuminating panels of stained glass in blues and yellows, the intricately carved stone of the Rood Screen, the candlelight gleaming off of polished marble, the huge space, high ceilings vaulted by dark beams. As the attendees’ eyes are just beginning to adjust to the dark, the choir, obscured to the left of the nave, begins singing. It all feels foreign and comforting, solemn and sacred. And dispersed throughout the seats are a community of undergraduates, almost none of whom identify as Christian, that take the twenty minutes out of their week to attend these Episcopalian services.

Greeting this community are the members of St. Hilda’s House, seven college graduates participating in the Episcopal Service Corps. For one year they live in the red house next to Christ Church, prepare Compline services, learn together, and serve the New Haven community through various organizations. They come from Atlanta and New York and Indiana. They studied theology and history and religious studies. Many of the Hildans chose to apply to Christ Church because it’s focus on service matched it’s focus on spiritual development, formation and growth. They attend Mass each morning. On Fridays, they participate in Didactics where they read and study the Bible, books, and articles, and in the afternoons they have spiritual direction, similar to spiritual counseling.

Last year a friend told me to come to these services. He described something that was “in the dark,” “spiritual,” “meditative.” He didn’t tell me it was in a church. I went back again the first time because I found the physical space holy in a way that was unfamiliar to me as a reform Jew. Since then I’ve gone back almost every week. The church attracts students who come from many different religious backgrounds, whose observances have maybe lapsed at college without the family pull to Mass on Sunday or Shabbat on Saturday. Compline services offer a beauty that is spiritual without being overtly denominational, engaging without being participatory. The ease of existing within this anachronistic space has created an escape from the constant busyness of Yale. It’s part of the reason I and so many of my peers have worked Compline into our weekly routines.

Christ Church’s heavy dark stone moors it in place on the island amidst the rush of traffic on Elm St. and Whalley Ave. While getting Junzi Night Lunch or doing work at Maison Mathis, you can see the Church’s tower looming over Yale’s popular shopping and eating district. As you walk towards off-campus housing, the three arched lancet windows lie flat and opaque against the apse. It appears almost lost on this intersection, a relic from another time, built in 1880 as an Anglo-Catholic offshoot of Trinity on the Green by Henry Vaughn, one of the original U.S. Gothic Revival architects. On first impression the church, which calls to mind Medieval England, is intimidating and immense, formal and upper-class. On its surface it is a strange draw for students. But Anglo-Catholicism, initially scorned by bishops for being seen as on the fringe of Protestantism, usually served areas considered “slum parishes.” According to Charlie Heeley, a member of St. Hilda’s House, “It was kind of out of the eye of the bishop and so a lot of the first Anglo-Catholic parishes were formed in neighborhoods that weren’t as wealthy.” And having a less wealthy parish, the church never rented out pews. It was a fact that the church literally advertised with plaques declaring, “You can sit wherever you want!” This openness is still felt among the attendees of Compline. In the dark, out of the harsh daylight, attendees can slip in and out without being seen. It is a completely non-threatening space. People walk into the Church and they feel that this place is different.

I walk through gothic churches silently and reverently, convinced by the intricacy and sheer mass that it is a place constantly in holy use. And so it was surprising that being led into the Sacristy by Father Carlos de la Torre, the curator and program director of St. Hilda’s House, felt ordinary. The Sacristy functions as the most sacred storage room ever, where all the vestments, cassocks, thuribles and processional crosses are kept. Laid out in color-coded drawers, the garments looked lustrous, but also extremely usual, folded crisply like shirts just out of the wash. The processional crosses and other items were placed haphazardly in corners, encrusted with stones or covered in silver and gold. These are items in active use. The room has a lived-in feel: it’s where I met the group of Hildans as they prepared before Compline, wanting to learn more about their work.

Here, I observed the manual processes of the rituals that create Compline. The incense that fills the church is ground from frankincense and myrrh in the building’s basement. During Lent, the usual lavender is swapped out for cedar — lavender is too happy for the occasion. I watched as the Hildans laid out tin foil in the bowl of the thurible, heated coals the size of gumballs, and then spooned the incense on top, poking at the coals until plumes of smoke start emanating out of the holes of the censer. I asked KC, the Hildan who swung the thurible back and forth to disperse the incense, how the tradition of using incense first came about. “Because people didn’t bathe all that often, and it just kept the church from smelling bad with all the bodies in there.” I asked if she was serious and she confirmed, “It just smelled really bad.”

In fact, most Episcopalian rituals began for practical reasons. Cassocks, the black robes, were worn so the clergy’s clothing didn’t get dirty. Sam Vaughn, a Yale Divinity student, and a member of St. Hilda’s House from 2016 to 2017 said, “Putting that cassock over my shoulders, and buttoning it up all the way to the top, that was the first thing I would do when I walked in. It was a rite and a ritual, a way of preparing myself for what I was going to do, which was to prepare a space and open a church and enable people to have some sort of experience.”

The Compline traditions are necessarily strange and different. The sensory experience of the incense and the candles brings people out of their daily lives. As I talked to the rector of Christ Church, Reverend Stephen C. Holton, I was struck by his language in speaking about God and Jesus and the Church. It was the first time I had ever heard religion addressed so passionately and candidly. He was convincing — after all he was a professional. “We hope that just by doing the thing,” he said, “by inviting people in, they’ll catch a glimpse of the beauty of holiness, and the sense that they’re deeply, deeply held by God.”

In the Monastic tradition, the day was marked with specific prayers, concluding with Compline. If you listen to the choir at the service, the prayers are of protection, of going to sleep and not knowing if you are going to wake up. I asked Father Carlos and Father Stephen what the agenda of the service was, and Father Stephen answered simply: “Compline is to have a time to pray.” Father Carlos explained further that “the overriding arch of Compline is the trust of living within God’s love, and being held in place, even when the illusion of control is stripped away and we’re asleep.”

Many of the students attending Compline seek out this space specifically because of this feeling of being grounded, though not necessarily of being grounded in God. Coming from a Jewish background, God is not a foreign concept to me, but the language and the method of Christian prayer is so different that in the darkness of the nave, even as I think big thoughts and feel something holy and present, I don’t fully understand the mechanism of the Church. I can’t think about Jesus and I can’t physically picture God holding me. And for many other undergraduates, prayer doesn’t even cross their mind. The choir sings in Elizabethan English, they sing Medieval polyphonic music, and so the words to someone who isn’t familiar with the prayers usually blend into the air. It’s easier not to think about the prayers when you don’t know what they’re saying. Mark Rosenberg, PC ’20, the friend who introduced me to Compline, told me that he just thinks about things he has to do. His mind races, but by the end of the service he feels like his preoccupations have been sorted out.

“To go to a space and be like, ‘This week sucks and everything is terrible but beauty still exists in the world.’ You just look left and see all the empty chairs and the candle at the end and the tall ceiling and you’re like, ‘Wow.’ There is some deep stuff in the world,” Soledad Tejana, DC ’20, says. It’s hard to express the meaning of a service like this — in a way, just sitting silently in the dark is powerful enough. It’s not as if the clergy doesn’t know this. They are aware that not every person is following the service and crossing themselves at the appropriate moments, thinking about God. Father Stephen knows that people come who identify with no faith but find the service “a still and quiet place to rest.”

It’s easy to take this lack of religious confrontation for granted. On Easter last year, Mark and I brought a group of friends to Compline for the first time. It didn’t occur to us that one of the holiest day of the year would be a bad time to introduce an Episcopal service to our non-Christian friends. People were taking communion, and kneeling, there were candles being passed out and the attendees were singing. When we left the Church and stood in the brisk night, in a cluster on the sidewalk, one boy turned to us and said, “This is not what I signed up for.” At that moment, it became painfully apparent that in having what we thought was our spiritual-but-not-religious moment, we were benefiting from something that in reality we hadn’t fully grappled with.

Yale students respect what Compline is a part of, but often use it more as an escape from campus than as a connection to God. “I think at Yale I often don’t feel centered,” Mara Hoplamazian, GH ’20, says.“I was looking for something that wasn’t talk therapy that I could go to every week to feel outside the weird train you get on at Yale of homework and class and partying — Compline is a nice way to have half an hour a week to not do anything.” Others who don’t necessarily find God during Compline find the familiar. It reminds Mark of his days at summer camp.

Students are aware of the potential disconnect between their personal use of Compline and its formal purpose. “I would say that the religious aspect of Compline only makes me uncomfortable insofar as I feel weary that I’m sort of intruding on a spiritual tradition that’s not really mine to claim,” Mark said. I originally felt the same way. Each Friday I lead reform Jewish services, where we sit in a tight circle of 15 or so and sing with a guitar. “How would you like it if a random Christian person came to your services, and was there to just be ‘spiritual’?” a friend’s roommate once asked me. A fair point, but there’s no reason that religion should be intimidating or unwelcoming. At Christ Church, the clergy embraces anyone who finds respite at Compline. “I don’t know why they come,” Father Stephen said to me. “But God does. So my job is to make sure those doors are open, to make sure we’re doing what it takes to proclaim the love of Jesus in the world.”

After Compline, the members of St. Hilda’s set out hot chocolate and cookies in the brightly lit building across the courtyard from the church. It’s next to the large room where the soup kitchen is held, and looks just like any other community space. Here, my friend talked to one of the Hildans about cutting her hair, Father Carlos showed off pictures of his dog, someone had their palms read, I talked about the Herald. “The people in that space are just normal folks like you and me, who will go back out to the streets of New Haven to do a study or go to sleep or to plan their week. But to have in that moment a spiritual moment, it’s pretty transcendent,” Father Stephen said to me. No one asked me what I prayed about that evening.

Attendance and engagement of the next generation are focuses of most religious communities. When Sam was an undergraduate at Wabash College in Indiana, he was the only college student at his church. “As someone who is training to be a priest,” he recounts, “it’s not like I wasn’t going to go to church. That’s where I wanted to be, that’s where I feel most alive, that’s where I feel called to be. But it’s hard sometimes to feel lonely in that way.” And for him, seeing 100 college students in church at 9:00 PM on a Sunday is “very cool.”

Next year I’ll be living in a house with six other people just a couple blocks away from Christ Church. We’ll be eating together and spending time together and living together, and in that way my life will overlap with the life of the Hildans. Yes, the Hildans are balancing prayer and service, and yes, their storage room is full of cassocks while mine contains shoeboxes. But their commitment to spiritual balance and community engagement is something that as students, living collectively, my friends and I can and should strive for.

At the end of the service you can hear the rifling of sheet music as the choir finishes singing. The light in the alcove switches off and the church is left in silence again. “I close my eyes and as soon as the music ends I can hear everyone walking around me. I hear them passing,” Soledad says. I usually sit long after people leave, and in those last couple of minutes, I hear the warm sounds of boots on the tile floor, traffic from Whalley Ave., and the rustle of clothing as people move to stand, and then to walk away.