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WHY FAITH MATTERS
Nearly 200 years after its founding, EHS remains committed to the spiritual growth of its students.
Sports began to push religion out of Lexi Weger’s life when she was in middle school. Weger ’18 grew up Catholic and made a habit of Sunday school and holidays with the whole family, including her sister, Shawn ’07, sliding into the pew. But weekend games and tournament travel had disrupted that routine, with consequences for her faith. “I kind of fell out of touch,” she says.
Arriving at Episcopal, Weger quickly came to crave the thrice-weekly chapel service and the calm it brought her as an array of new things crowded her mind and schedule. Weger settled in to campus life soon enough — she graduated with All-Met and All-State basketball honors and the grades to earn admission to Princeton — but throughout her four years, she relished the quiet and stillness of Callaway Chapel, the soft light filtering in from the stained glass. “It was a safe haven,” she says.
She particularly liked that students dropped their backpacks at the door, a figurative unburdening of the work and stresses they shouldered daily. Once again regularly sitting in a pew, she felt surrounded by people who loved and supported her.
“Chapel is just so special that without it, Episcopal can’t be the place that it is,” Weger says.
Episcopal High School was founded 180 years ago with a singular purpose: train young men for the seminary. Church leaders hoped the School, working in tandem with the Virginia Theological Seminary, its neighbor on The Holy Hill, could bolster the ranks of the priesthood.
The role of religion at Episcopal has changed since then, as it has in America itself. Increasingly, EHS reflects the country’s growing religious pluralism; the Vestry, the student group that organizes chapel services and encourages religious discussion on campus, last year welcomed its first member who is a practicing Muslim.
Yet with all its students, the School still considers their spiritual growth one of its highest priorities, regardless of their faith background. This work will always be key to Episcopal’s mission, as it’s a crucial element of the education of young adults.
First and foremost, faith defines and inspires many of the character traits that EHS aims to instill, like humility, kindness, empathy. To stand silent on that, particularly at a boarding school where students spend 24 hours a day, would signal that faith and spirituality are not integral to their lives, or at least not as important as calculus or English or football. The teen years are critical for adolescents to forge their personal identities, yet absent a robust EHS religious program, students could conclude that faith does not play a role in who they are, or who they will be.
The School’s ongoing focus on and confidence in its identity as an Episcopal school were a big draw for Charley Stillwell as he considered the job as Head of School back in 2015. “The identity grounds all our students in crucial values and an understanding that they are all part of something much greater than themselves,” he says. “This crucial spiritual life of the School reminds our students that they have both the capacity and a responsibility to make a positive difference in the lives of others here on campus and beyond our gates throughout their lives.”
Faith and spirituality are routinely discussed and practiced on campus. Campus activities offer dozens of opportunities each month — in worship, in the classroom, and in extracurriculars — to help students examine their beliefs and to support them in their faith journey.
The Rev. Betsy Gonzalez, head chaplain, says many students are curious about what faith means for the larger world, and what it might mean for them.
Though every student attends chapel, their engagement varies. For many, Episcopal represents their first worship community, says The Rev. Betsy Gonzalez, head chaplain at the School. Some may have grown up attending worship irregularly, if at all. Others are testing whether they have outgrown their beliefs from childhood. Regardless, most come to campus curious about what faith means for the larger world, and what it might mean for them.
“They ask where faith intersects with the big questions of their lives, whether those are about relationships or the presence of evil in the world or loss and grief,” she explains. “They want to know where those things come together.”
Callaway Chapel sits near the heart of campus, steps from Baker Science Center, the proximity a reminder that faith and reason both have a place on campus.
“It looks as if it belongs and will last,” wrote Benjamin Forgery, the Washington Post’s architecture critic when the chapel opened in 1991. Forgery noted that the interior echoed the Washington National Cathedral; its visual centerpiece, the round stained-glass window at the back of the sanctuary, was created and installed by the cathedral’s master artisan, the late Dieter Goldkuhle, father of Andrew Goldkuhle ’85. Upon glimpsing the new building, Joan Holden, then head of nearby St. Agnes School (soon to become St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes), said she believed it was grander in design and scale than any chapel built by a school in decades.
Each year students gather in chapel for their first worship service even before their first class. During any given month, students gather as many as 20 different times in Callaway for worship on campus. The Episcopal liturgical tradition undergirds a chapel service that has become uniquely Episcopal. With the creation of the Chapel Songbook, the community has crafted a chapel service that includes readings from scripture, hymns, prayers from a number of religious traditions, recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, prayers for the needs of the community, and the passing of the peace. Throughout the year, the School comes together to celebrate the Christian calendar’s major events. And each year, a handful of students take confirmation classes and become members of the Episcopal Church in a spring service in which the Bishop of Virginia presides.
Callaway is also the scene of the commissioning of graduating seniors, an emotional sendoff at their last chapel service. As they stand lining the walls of the sanctuary, Gonzalez walks among them, gently touching each on the head and praying.
“Our Creator God, it’s an honor to join you in affirming and celebrating Episcopal’s Class of 2019,” she said this year. “You have created each of them in your image. You have created them to live inside a big story, not a small one — your story — the story in which your glory and honor and truth and beauty and grace and love are at the center.”
As Gonzalez slowly made her way around the room, students and faculty wept. Her voice occasionally choked with emotion. She later said she avoided looking directly at students for fear that she, too, would cry and be unable to finish the prayer.
Pierson Gammage ’20 is no stranger to worship.
Her father is Catholic, her mother takes seminary classes, and Pierson grew up attending youth group and Bible study in a nondenominational Christian church in her hometown of Greenwich, Conn. “Faith has been a constant for me,” she says.
When looking at high schools, Pierson was drawn to Episcopal in part because of its religious identity. At the end of her first year, Pierson joined the Vestry, the student group that organizes chapel worship and creates informal opportunities for students to consider their faith in other settings.
Pierson Gammage ’20 (left), senior warden of the student Vestry: “I’m very open to talking about my faith. It’s something I enjoy.”
This fall, Pierson assumed the role of senior warden in the Vestry. It’s a position that’s a magnet for students who want to talk about faith, says Paul Pivirotto ’19, her predecessor. “I’ve had countless times where people have come and asked me really difficult religious or philosophical questions, and that led to a three-hour conversation, which is awesome,” he says.
Paul says many of those who sought him out balked at organized religion yet not at faith itself. “They’re spiritual, not religious, but sometimes they do open their ears during chapel and listen. There are some things that appeal to them. Or they say, ‘I don’t take that Bible story 100 percent seriously, but I like the message it was putting out there.’”
Pierson welcomes such conversations. As a junior, she joined and helped to lead Christian Fellowship, a student group that meets twice a month for dinner and discussion. It was born organically perhaps 15 years ago when students sought to create a venue in which they could talk about faith, the Bible, and their lives.
Math teacher Mimi Schwanda and her husband, Peter, lead the group’s discussions. They see each gathering as an opportunity for the students to step back from their daily grind and consider questions of faith in a relaxed forum with friends.
Gilbert Amason ’20 talks about his Episcopal experience at a September chapel service. Students deliver the homily at Friday services, one of the ways they help shape worship.
“This is a chance for them to think about what they’re hearing and seeing in chapel and how it’s going to integrate into their day-to-day lives,” Mimi says. One semester, they studied the Lord’s Prayer. “We say this prayer every time we’re in church. But we decided to take it line by line and ask: What are we saying? What does it mean? And what does it mean about the way we live? What is God asking us to do through these words?”
The Schwandas believe teenagers need to talk through faith matters among themselves, apart from authority figures and outside formal structures. “They need a place where it’s safe for them to articulate things,” Peter says. “They need to try on beliefs and figure out what it is they believe and hear their peers in a place that feels slightly less institutional. It’s a chance for them to consider what their faith means to them.”
Pierson says many students arrive at fellowship with a deep faith; others are still exploring. “It’s important to talk about what you believe and to hear what others believe because it makes your opinion even stronger. I’m very open to talking about my faith. It’s something I enjoy.”
Despite her many church-related activities back in Connecticut, Pierson says her EHS experience has only deepened her faith. “Through the group, the Vestry, and other things, I feel like I have an even stronger community of Christian friends here at EHS than I did at home. And I believe that’s just another thing that makes Episcopal such a unique and special place.”
The role of faith at EHS today has its roots in a bitter conflict 50 years ago that could have led Episcopal, like other schools at the time, to shed its religious identity.
In the late 1960s, EHS students agitated against policies they argued shackled their development and treated them as children, not young men on the verge of independence. Graduation requirements, the demerit system, and the ban on long sideburns came under attack, but the daily chapel services and Sunday worship sparked perhaps the strongest enmity.
Students argued that they were herded into pews for rote worship that was dictated by tradition and devoid of relevance for young men. A Chronicle survey of seniors in 1967 found that 84 percent believed the School’s religious program actually weakened their faith. The newspaper’s editors recognized the incongruity of a religiously founded school that pushed students away from faith; they lobbied the administration to invest more in students’ spiritual growth and help them wrestle with questions of faith, they said. Among other things, the newspaper urged the School to hire its first full-time chaplain.
Callaway Chapel opened in 1991, a time when other private schools were stepping back from their religious identities.
Addressing what the Chronicle dubbed “the religion problem” ultimately fell to Archibald R. Hoxton, Jr. ’35, the legendary EHS athlete and valedictorian who had grown up on campus while his father and namesake was Principal. In the fall of 1967, Hoxton, now a veteran teacher and school administrator, took the reins as Headmaster and moved quickly. He first asked The Rev. John Smith, an assistant pastor of a church in New Hampshire, to study campus faith life, then hired him as the School’s first full-time chaplain. Hoxton endowed the new position with considerable authority, Smith says; the chaplain was made the School’s third-highest ranking official, and Smith was given a coveted house on campus previously occupied by the football coach.
Smith and Hoxton began a refashioning of faith life at the School that would continue into the tenure of Sandy Ainslie ’56, a top administrator under Hoxton who would become Headmaster in 1981. Smith led a committee of faculty, students, and administrators that worked for two years and issued in 1971 a blueprint for change. Among their proposals: move worship from the Pendleton Hall auditorium to a dedicated chapel building, a recommendation that Ainslie as Headmaster would realize with the opening of Callaway Chapel in 1991.
The report also called upon the School to turns its Bible-focused religious studies curriculum into a theology program that treated the study of religion — Christianity primarily at that time, but other faiths, too — as an academic discipline. To grow in their faith, Smith says, students needed more sophisticated instruction than what they got in Sunday school. “I wanted these young men to start making some decisions on their own about how faith was going to fit into their lives,” Smith says.
Jack Donaldson ’20 sings a song by the Lumineers at a September chapel service. Students routinely prepare and perform a special piece of music in chapel, one of the ways they help shape worship.
Not coincidentally, the School also began to yield its authority over how students worshipped and examined their faith. In a newly created School Worship Committee, faculty and students came together to plan each week’s Sunday service. Discussion groups were launched for the community to consider what the Chronicle described as “practical, spiritual, and philosophical questions of daily life.”
The newspaper applauded these moves, acknowledging that the School was taking a risk by ceding some control. “It’s in our hands!” it concluded triumphantly.
Fifty years later, though the School’s chaplains and choral director lead chapel services, students play a large role in designing worship.
Begun under Headmaster Ainslie, the Vestry directs peers who serve as acolytes, readers, and torch bearers. Vestry members also create a cycle of prayer for the year in which they take time in chapel to pray for each advisory and School administrative department, ensuring that every student and adult in the community is named in prayer at some point. Gonzalez also makes a point to pray for family members and alumni who have passed away. Many students, she notes, experience the death of someone close for the first time while at school, and they need support and to learn that they don’t carry their grief alone.
Students outside the Vestry also routinely prepare a special piece of music to sing or perform — an opportunity for them to express themselves in front of a supportive community. At Friday services, the homily is set aside for students to deliver a talk about a personal experience — a family death or divorce, a personal struggle, a learning moment — but also matters in the national news. Meron Teskete ’19 last year brought the audience to its feet for a standing ovation following his story of how his family fled a repressive government in Eritrea when he was 10 years old.
Christian Wright ’18, who was senior warden of the Vestry, is exporting the EHS brand of student-led worship to Wofford College, where he’s a sophomore. Wofford doesn’t lack for Christian worship and study opportunities, but Wright found them stifling after Episcopal. “I felt as though I was being force-fed information,” he says.
With another student, Wright last year launched A Simple Meal, a student-organized Wednesday worship service modeled in part on the Episcopal chapel service. Ordained clergy preside, but Wright and friends plan the music, the scripture reading, the lesson. Afterward, everyone gathers for soup and conversation.
“That’s why chapel at Episcopal is so different and so special: It’s the students,” he says.
The chapel service leaves an imprint on many students, regardless of their faith. Almost two years after they graduated, members of the Class of 2014 were confronted by the death of their EHS friend and classmate Chris Shea, who was known for his laughter and joy. Distraught, several Episcopal alumni at Southern Methodist University reached out to each other and, feeling the need to be together, gathered at the university’s small church — a place Episcopal had taught them can be a source of comfort. Sitting silently in the back pew, they watched the chorus practice, letting the music wash over them.
EHS chapel services certainly left an imprint on Lexi Weger. In her first year at Princeton, as she transitioned to college life and academics, she was again stressed and anxious. The opening of basketball season left her feeling overwhelmed.
“Can you help?” she said in a text to Gonzalez at Episcopal. The two talked and considered how she could find a worship experience at Princeton akin to Episcopal’s.
Weger also asked Gonzalez to send her a copy of the Chapel Songbook. She knew many of the hymns by heart, but that was not enough. She needed a physical copy of the songbook, a little piece of Episcopal itself.
“ Why Are People Fighting Over This?”
Shawn Mustafa ’20, the first practicing Muslim on the student Vestry, leads the day’s version of the cycle of prayer, in which each student, faculty, and staff member is prayed for once during the year.
Since its founding, Episcopal has sought to nurture the spiritual growth of its students. Given modern America’s religious pluralism, however, that looks different today than it did in 1839.
Obviously, the School no longer follows its initial charge from the Episcopal church to prepare young men for seminary. Yet EHS embraces the denomination’s welcoming doctrine and aims to support every student in their faith journey.
“For the Episcopal Church, it’s really about having a big-tent philosophy,” says the Rev. Betsy Gonzalez, head chaplain at the School. “We’re called to be not only in conversation and in concert with our fellow Christians, but also with people of all faiths, people of no faith, people of strong faith.”
Not coincidentally, application to the campus Vestry is open to all students, regardless of their faith background. The group helps organize chapel services and creates opportunities for students to explore their spirituality.
Last year it launched the Seekers, a group that aims to identify structured and informal ways to help students of all faiths.
In one of its first events, Seekers helped coordinate a dinner discussion in Bryan Library about religious identity and expression on campus. The School also put on an iftar, the traditional community evening meal by which Muslims break their Ramadan fast. More than 40 students and adults attended, and a number of community members fasted for the day leading up to it.
Last spring, Shawn Mustafa ’20 became what is believed to be the first practicing Muslim to join the Vestry. Shawn came to Episcopal from Saudi Arabia, where his family regularly attends Friday mosque services. Christianity was largely a mystery; he had never heard the Lord’s Prayer before his first EHS chapel services.
Still, Shawn was intrigued by the worship and prayer. He says Gonzalez sought him out early to make sure he was comfortable, and the two soon were talking regularly. Though Shawn had reservations about joining the Vestry, he decided that working within the group would be the best way to support other non-Christians on campus in their faith.
In addition to his work on the Vestry, Shawn is a member of the choir. He says he loves singing and music theory and welcomes the opportunity to work with music from England and around the world. A senior, he will this year complete the required Biblical Theology course, in which he will have the opportunity to write the gospel from his perspective.
He says the Episcopal religious program has helped him discover parallels between Christianity and his faith. “I definitely used to think that Islam and Christianity are vastly different,” he says. “That was a huge shock to me: ‘Wow, they aren’t that different; why are people fighting over this?’ ”
Shawn remains devoted to Islam. He has a prayer mat in his dorm room and uses apps on his phone that help him squeeze Quran readings into the busy EHS schedule. He talks with his mother daily. “She constantly reminds me to pray any chance I get,’ he says. “And to thank Allah for the blessings of family and fortune he has given me.”
Not all students outside the Christian faith feel comfortable with Episcopal’s religious program. Some invest minimally in chapel or other elements. Others may “closet” their faith because they worry that they will stand out at a School with a strong Episcopal tradition.
Shawn and other Vestry members began last spring exploring how to support such students and make them feel welcome to express their faith. The discussion led to twice-monthly visits to campus this fall by Imam Ali Siddiqui of the Muslim Institute for Interfaith Studies and Understanding. He joins students for a Sunday brunch, study, and prayer, and then comes to campus on a Friday to teach how they can lead Friday prayers themselves.
EHS is exploring a similar arrangement to regularly bring to campus a leader from a local Jewish synagogue. Says Gonzalez: “These changes are apart of the School’s growing commitment across the board to meet students where they are and to bring them into community together, but also to facilitate their individual practices and traditions inside that unity.”
Says Shawn: “We need to make people of all faiths feel comfortable.”
