CHAPEL TALK

StC Traditions: Long-standing and Newly Created in the Time of COVID

A March 1 chapel talk delivered by J.D. Jump ’05

Like many other boys schools all over the country, tradition is something we hold dear. Many things that we do go directly back to our founder, Dr. Chamberlayne, such as the Honor System, Missionary Society, Society Meetings and prayer card. The danger with traditions is that they sometimes remain because that’s the way we’ve always done them, without questioning the reasoning. Fortunately for us, St. Christopher’s is pretty good at periodically reassessing to make sure our traditions still serve a useful purpose. What that means is that our traditions, new and old, are meaningful actions we perform with intention. In my theological education, we studied liturgy, or the formula of our worship. Those of you who attend church regularly have probably noticed the repetitiveness. While certain parts change, the order is generally the same. You’ll probably get different hymns, scriptures and sermons, but those pieces are likely to be in the same place in the service, with other pieces that are exactly the same every week. Most worship services make use of the Lord’s Prayer, which means that if you attend worship on a weekly basis you say it roughly 50 times a year, which means in your lifetime you could say it upwards of 4,000 times. That’s one example of how worship asks us to repeat the same few words over and over again. Why is that? The purpose behind the liturgy differs from the purpose behind our acquisition of knowledge. The liturgy’s purpose is not for us to learn or memorize the words, but to internalize them. Through repetition, the hope is that the words become a part of us. In some ways, repeating liturgy is more akin to working out than to acquiring knowledge. When you build a muscle, you must work that muscle over and over to build it up over time. The liturgy is the act of exercising our souls instead of our muscles. As a junior at Randolph Macon College, I went on a trip during January term to a Brazilian United Methodist camp where we worked to improve facilities and provide activities for local children. While attending worship at a local church, one thing that stuck out was the part of service where we recited the Lord’s Prayer. The service was in Portuguese and we only spoke English, but we were all saying the Lord’s Prayer together at the same time, in our own tongue. This really opened my eyes to a universal truth, that pretty much every Christian who has ever lived has recited the Lord’s Prayer. In a way, every time we say it we are praying alongside every Christian who has ever lived and who will ever live. You may have noticed that we have said the Lord’s Prayer for almost every chapel service we have had since I have been covering chapel. This is not an accident.

On a smaller scale, we are lucky as members of the St. Christopher’s community to have our own personal liturgy, the prayer card written by Dr. Chamberlayne. Such shared traditions tie us together. They tie us to our classmates and teachers and to the greater Saints community with whom we may or may not have anything else in common. These traditions are the things that people who have graduated five, 10, 20 and 50 years ago still talk about.

COVID-19 has posed a particularly interesting challenge for us in that we can’t participate in most of our traditions, at least not in usual ways. We’ve worked hard from the beginning of the school year to try and do something with our traditions, even if we have to take a different approach. We’ve had chapel services, first outside, then in rooms by grade level. We did a prerecorded All Saints Service and a Lessons and Carols that was a mix of prerecorded music and live readers. We had choir and Jazz Band concerts live-streamed from the Recital Hall. We even had a version of the traditional Student Council Christmas. I think we would all concede these are compromises, and we wouldn’t have done them this way had we been given the choice, but this has also given us a chance to look in a really focused way at what makes each of our traditions special and how we could capture some of that magic, even with limitations posed by COVID. While things won’t be “normal” for a while yet, we will continue to try and celebrate these traditions in whatever way we can. A couple of weeks ago, the life of the church presented us with yet another special tradition that was a little bit different this year. As we do every year, we celebrated Ash Wednesday. In previous years we all had the chance to get ashes imposed on our foreheads. This year we imposed our own. It would certainly be possible to view this as another thing that COVID made us compromise on, but I would encourage you to think of it differently. In a regular year, the act of imposition is limited by the number of people helping with the service. This year we actually got to all impose the ashes all together. What a truly communal act. ... Traditions are only truly valuable when they conform to our core values. In the case of Ash Wednesday, the “compromise” we made ended up being closer to the core value of that ritual than the tradition.

As we finish this year out, we will continue to celebrate our normal milestones in whatever way we can. I encourage you to take some time to reflect on these big traditions as they happen. They will undoubtedly be different from the way we have done them in past years, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Try to keep an open mind and consider what might work better in the different way we do things. How might some of our changes be even better than the traditions they are replacing? Amen

After graduating from StC, J.D. Jump ’05 was accepted into the Bailey pre-Ministerial program at Randolph-Macon College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in drama and music, and went on to earn a master’s from Duke University Divinity School. He serves as the School’s multimedia and technology specialist, Upper School Makerspace teacher, and helps with Ampersand, the joint theater group of St. Christopher’s and St. Catherine’s.