Putting away the silver
In her essay “An Expedition to the Pole,” Annie Dillard writes about explorers who didn’t make it. When their skeletons were exhumed, researchers learned a lot about their last days. For instance, many of them tucked settings of silver into their coats. When those adventurers braved the frigid brutalities of the Antarctic, they could not imagine leaving behind those elegant and weighty trappings of luxury. They clutched their family crest etched into the polished metal even when they didn’t have the sustenance to survive. This image reminded Dillard of the church.
It’s a metaphor that Robert Leopold also uses as he describes his adventure starting Southside Abbey, a church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “We can get so worried about the silver,” Leopold said as we met over lunch. The Eucharist is central to Leopold’s ministry, but “in our churches, we’ve stylized the meal so much that we can’t even recognize it any longer,” Leopold said. “What is that wafer and tiny cup? How is that a meal?”
If I’m portraying Leopold as a cynic, he’s not. He loves traditional worship, pipe organs, and silver settings. He radiates with passion for the history of the Episcopal Church he serves. Yet two years ago he realized that he wasn’t called to be the pastor of an established church any longer. He was ready to put the silver in the closet in order to reach out to the “un-churched, anti-churched, and over-churched.” Leopold asked his bishop if he could start a new congregation, and Southside Abbey began with a grant from the diocese.
