February 2020

(Updated March 2023)

Our visits to St. Andrew’s School, where our twin sons study, are filled with sports events, talking with teachers and, of course, catch-up time with the boys. But a part of me aches to descend to the chapel for quiet time. When I do make it down those 36 steps, I am welcomed by a subterranean coolness. The wooden pews and vaulted ceiling invite me in for contemplation. There, in the cradle of St. Andrew’s, I find a peace.

The chapel wasn’t always so welcoming. When I was a student at St. Andrew’s in the 1980s, I remember uncomfortable moments stemming from feeling like an interloper in an Episcopalian school. My parents did not have me or my brothers baptized. Bibles stayed on the shelf at home, and I can’t remember going to church as a child. So, when, at a chapel service in the early 1980s, the Rev. Sandy Ogilby singled me out to name an Old Testament character, I froze. Would my lack of knowledge be exposed to all present? We had been studying the New Testament in Sacred Studies class, but I had little background in the Old Testament.

Silence in the chapel. Panic inside.

I blurted out, “Paul.”

To my surprise, Mr. Ogilby nodded and continued his talk. Only later did I find out that Paul appears in both the New and Old Testaments. I had no idea he was in the Old Testament. Call it grace that his name came to me in the clutch.

***

To the school’s credit, in those days, St. Andrew’s allowed students like me, who hadn’t been baptized, to take communion. (That “grace” has been expanded today, with chapel goers welcome to kneel, cross their arms and ask for a blessing instead of taking the bread and water.) While a student from 1979-1982, I also served as an acolyte. These were my gradual introductions to chapel life.

As the years passed, my uneasiness over lack of a religious upbringing receded. I found myself drawn to an interior life. Let’s say I got interested in cultivating the soul. It found expression in visits to houses of worship around the world as I pursued my career in journalism and international development. I sat in meditation in Buddhist temples in South Korea, lit candles in Orthodox churches in Russia, and organized a solo bike tour in France, lodging at Catholic monasteries along the way. These days, respite comes in the form of silent retreats at a Burmese meditation center outside Baltimore.

***

I have St. Andrew’s – and its chapel – to thank for setting me on the course of being a searcher of solitude and quiet. It’s a personal journey, so different from the communal activities we associate with the school, such as discussions around the Harkness table, team sports and community service. And it’s a unique journey, not grounded in belief in a religion but based on the spiritual needs and wants of the individual. The school’s call for students to explore their spirituality and faith goes back decades. The school’s first headmaster Reverend Walden Pell wrote to parents in 1952: “We are sensitive to the fact that a quarter of our pupils are members of other churches or of no church at all. We try to describe our religion to the boys and tell them why we hold it but let them make their own decisions and respect their freedom of conscience and intellectual integrity.”

Those are beautiful words.

***

St. Andrew’s chapel has been central to school life since its founding nearly 100 years ago. Reverend Pell planned every detail, down to advising the gilders and painters as they decorated the chapel’s magnificent carved figures. On October 14, 1930, the dedication of St. Andrew’s began in the chapel itself, followed by founder Felix DuPont and Headmaster Pell leading a procession upstairs to dedicate the corridors, dormitories and classrooms of the school’s first buildings. Pell, an ordained Episcopalian pastor who ran the school for its first thirty years, spoke to the chapel’s special“interior” mission in school life when he wrote that “the response to faith in God has to be inward, considered, sincere and wholehearted.”

Yes, the St. Andrew’s chapel is a community space, but, ultimately, it’s also a place of private worship. In an address to the St. Andrew’s community in 2014, Headmaster Tad Roach, in describing the chapel as a sanctuary, said, “This chapel’s agenda is to recognize the profound human need we all have to think, explore and articulate our own spirituality.” Yes, for nearly a century the chapel has been preparing St. Andrew’s graduates for the world with a quiet summons: don’t forget the life of the soul.

That’s why the chapel beckons me – a combination of Christian faith and Buddhist practice — again and again. It is a place of grace at the heart of the school. A sacred space where we can give our minds a rest while we “speak” silently with our hearts. Here knowledge can take a back seat, including of Biblical characters.

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