A friend asked me to come to his birthday dinner next week. “That is,” he added, “if they’ll let you out.”
“Let me out?” I asked.
I have been a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary for more than a year. I’m about mid-way through the Master’s in Divinity program, on my way — God willing and the people consenting — to ordination in the Episcopal Church. But I still have some in my circle who don’t quite understand what I’m doing with my time.
Some of them, like my birthday friend, hear the word “seminary” and assume I spend my days in robes, cloistered in some stone tower, chanting away in a tiny room. When he asks, “Will they let you out?” I think he’s imagining some fearsome character of indistinct gender with a heavy ring of skeleton keys, guarding a heavy swinging gate. He imagines that I use the heavy ropes ordinarily wrapped around my cloaks to form a simple knot-ladder, which I use to slip down from the tower window and into the foggy night.
Instead, I’m a graduate student who spends a lot of time, voluntarily, in the seminary library — it’s a gorgeous place to read and study, but still: it’s a library — and in my free time I do what other graduate students do, which is to drink espresso and complain about the reading.
It’s the word “seminary” that throws them. Our culture is now so secular that words that used to be in the common vocabulary now have an exotic and spooky vibe. The language of religion, which used to be as familiar and common as words we use every day, such as “upload” and “probiotic,” now has a weirdness that causes old friends to ask if “they” will “let” me come to a birthday party.
Religious people love their fancy language. In the Episcopal Church, for instance, the little space in between the front door of a church and the main part is called the narthex. And the room with the robes and various items necessary for Sunday services is called the sacristy. There’s also a chancel and sometimes even an undercroft, which makes the whole vocabulary sometimes sound like a medical procedure. How’s your sacristy? Better now, thanks, since they went into my undercroft with the chancel. The good news is that I didn’t have to have my narthex removed.
Church language, in other words, can be fussy. That may be one of the reasons people without church experience sometimes feel awkward or out of place when they find themselves in the pews — though it’s also probably what draws other people to the church in the first place — and it’s another indication that the world of church and church-going has been separated from our common, workaday culture. It’s exotic, like some kind of weird culinary thing. If you have a friend who is very into omakase-style sushi, you know what I mean. They start to talk about the circumference of certain grains of rice, and you think, “Oh man, get me out of here.”
Of course, the whole point of church is to get you in there. One of the reasons I left my career in show business to come to Princeton Theological Seminary is because I believe that a lot of what people are searching for today — and let’s be clear, people really are searching — can be found on Sunday mornings. So some of the fancier language we use is probably counterproductive. The glorious and powerful language of the Book of Common Prayer — the foundational guide to the Anglican and Episcopalian tradition, and I have to write those defining words because apparently, for a lot of you, even a simple word like “seminary” is trouble — is nearly perfect as it is. So I might suggest to my future bosses in the Episcopal Church that we could dial down some of the language we use for the other, nonliturgical stuff.
I spent more than three decades in the entertainment industry, so I’m obsessed with how to get A.I.S. — asses in seats. Theater seats, church pews, whatever. You can’t do squat unless you got the A.I.S.
“So you’ll come?” My friend asked, after we had hashed out the whole Seminary-definition issue.
“No,” I said. “I can’t, sorry. I have a research paper due next week, and I need to finish it.”
“So that’s the actual reason? It’s not that you’re, like, a monk or whatever, it’s that you’re a…”
MAGAZINE: CAMERAS OFF, HONESTY ON
“A nerd,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Correct.”
Which is a word that works for everyone.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the cofounder of Ricochet.com.