The Altar Guild

A Community of Service and Spirituality

by Amy Ufer

For twenty-five years, the Altar Guild at Christ Church Cathedral was an extremely important part of my life, and it continues to be as I reflect on my experiences, which have been like building blocks, rather than mountain-top experiences. I loved serving on the Altar Guild. It was an exciting and treasured time for me with meaning, purpose, and a great sense of belonging.

According to Webster, service is performance of labor for the benefit of another, and spiritual serving, as shown by obedience, good works, and love, is dedication to the service of God. The word spirituality comes from the Latin spiritus, which means "breath," referring to the breath of life. It goes on to be defined as "life"-the life principle, conceived as a kind of vapor animating the body, or, in humankind, the life principle mediating between body and soul.

Years ago the Cathedral was always open. One Saturday morning when the meeting I was attending lasted into lunchtime, I was elected to get hamburgers. As it was an extremely stormy day, I cut through the church so I wouldn't get so wet going to the café across Fannin. Walking through the dark church, I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. The silence was overwhelming, profound, and charged with mystery. In this holy, sacred place, I felt a deep connection to God. My senses were recording and reporting something deeper than words. I was connected to something greater than myself. . . . This experience of being deeply connected is a metaphor for all my years in the Altar Guild.

The Altar Guild is a remarkable community of women and men who are bound together through incredible commitment, caring, and support for each other, our priests, and the Cathedral. The training for this ministry was intense and interesting-and I wanted to stay in training forever! I was terrified of the responsibility of setting the Lord's Table. What if I didn't do it right? What if it weren't perfect?

This service demanded far more knowledge than I had. There were so many words that were foreign to me-corporal, flagon, piscina, purificator, ciborium. There were these rituals that I didn't understand as symbols yet. For instance, why did we put consecrated wine and wafers in certain containers? What did "consecrated" mean? I heard the words long before they meant anything to me. Slowly the words began to have identity, but the rituals needed clarifying.

I went to Don Crawford, one of our priests and a good friend, and asked him to talk to me about these rituals. Basically, he said, it's simple: you either believe that the elements of bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ, or you don't. These symbols of bread and wine took on new life for me as I began to understand the meaning of the rituals and to work through what I believed. The continuous rehearsal of the rituals made the symbols come alive for me with new meaning.

The two main sacraments of the Church are Eucharist and baptism. Their symbols are bread, wine, and water-a meal and a bath, as one of our priests used to say.

I remember a story told some years ago by our former dean Pittman McGehee. A young man who had been living on the streets came to the altar rail one Sunday, and when the priest gave him the Host, saying, "The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven," the boy looked up and asked, "Is it?" Pittman paused, looked straight at him, and said, "Yes." Then as he gave the young man the cup, saying, "The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation," the young man again asked, "Is it?" Looking him in the eye, Pittman said, "Yes." Pittman commented how meaningful it is to encounter these messengers of God, for they cause us to discern our own belief. In Eucharist the bread and wine take on the dual nature of Christ. Symbols are never one-sided; they have the power of opposites.

The water of baptism holds not only the dying to the old life, but being born into the new. For me, this is an ongoing process. This difficult letting go of old attitudes and birthing and embracing new ones is our life's work. Water is the source and the grave of all things in the universe. It is the source of all possibilities in existence. Waters always dissolve, abolish, wash away, purify, and regenerate. Water is a symbol of the unconscious. All waters are symbolic of the Great Mother and are associated with birth, the feminine principle, and the universal womb. Some consider the Church a womb, a container that holds, nurtures, and sustains.

Symbols always point beyond themselves and speak to us of the things we feel inside but don't have words for. I felt the truth of that when our daughter, Kate, was baptized- named, sealed, and marked as Christ's own for ever. After that point in the service, I expected Kate to be handed back to me. Instead, the priest turned away with our child, going toward the center aisle, and took her into the heart of the church to be welcomed as its newest member, into the womb that holds, nurtures, and sustains. This brought joy to our hearts. . . . When I was setting up for other baptisms, I remembered.

Symbols were used to communicate before people could read, and are an essential part of ancient art. Our souls are aware of symbols even when we are not conscious of them. Rituals are healing to our souls. Learning the art of thinking in symbolic language is a gift, especially in our literal-thinking Western culture. We need to know how to feed both body and soul, nature and spirit. This special language of symbols is fed by rituals, myths, fairy tales, and our own dreams.

Each of us needs to search out and know what feeds and refreshes our souls, and what changes our energy in order to care for ourselves. These findings will change throughout our lifetime as we grow and change. There are days when my focus is fractured, for some reason, and I know I need to stop wherever I am, and kneel or sit in silence in prayer. This helps me collect myself, focus, and get grounded in the peace of God. I always found it helpful, when coming to do Altar Guild work, to go first to the altar rail. This neutralized my energy so I could start afresh on whatever awaited me, without the distractions I brought with me from home.

Daily we experience God through our senses, through the ordinary, the mundane. Occasionally, something causes us to catch our breath, or brings tears to our eyes-something like seeing light weave its way through a stained glass window, hearing music made by melodic voices that pierces your heart, having a baby snuggle close against your body, jumping into the river on a hot day, feeling the love in your mother's eyes, or experiencing the rhythm of your breath filling and emptying your being, the taste of water when you are parched, or perhaps the smell of a pipe that transports you into the presence of someone you love. There is also the other side of the mystery-feeling the pain of great loss. Is this not soul food, too? Life is strange!

What we feel has much to do with our experiences and how we perceive them at the time. So, how do we make choices-out of duty, or pleasure? Take the routines faithfully followed by the Altar Guild-all the cleaning, washing, drying, ironing, dusting, waxing, scrubbing, trimming, arranging, and decorating. Are they not, at one level, rituals of transformation? What is our attitude as we offer these gifts? One of drudgery? Or is it service that soothes and even heals one's soul when given as gift?

Being involved with the Altar Guild was for me like being backstage in life. It allowed me to feel at the edge of the mystery in a service that recharged my being. The years of giving and receiving in this discipline encouraged my growth and changed and enriched the way I worship. Serving in the Altar Guild has been one of my most valued experiences.

Some things in life are not what we think they are. When I headed my Altar Guild team (there are four teams and each serves for one week a month), we had one woman who loved serving at the eight o'clock Sunday morning service and had done so for years. I was always delighted, as it seemed a real upheaval to leave my house at seven in the morning before anyone was up, much less dressed or fed. Then, one day, this woman came to me and said they were moving. I was the natural person to take over this service, and as fate would have it, it turned out to be a great blessing. I loved being in the Cathedral all alone in the sacred silence of the early morning.

Being a part of the Altar Guild is a privilege for many reasons. One of the opportunities it offers is working weddings and funerals. Of course, when the person involved is dear to you, it's quite poignant. An interesting phenomenon about weddings and funerals is the way the clergy and the Altar Guild interchange the names of these two celebrations, calling a wedding a funeral and a funeral a wedding. In thinking of endings and beginnings, each has both! Marriage is a beginning, but also the end of a single relationship as we know it. Funerals are endings of life as we know it, but certainly a new beginning-in the unknown.

In February 1989, at the end of my term as directress of the Altar Guild, the Cathedral hosted the Diocesan Council at Brown Convention Center, where over three thousand people were expected to participate in the opening Eucharist. This meant that twelve stations would be needed for Eucharist, each equipped with priests, vessels, and Altar Guild members.

Delegating had been my key concept that year as directress. I had always found it hard to do, but delegating builds a committed community. It was exciting to have so many women volunteer, for there was much to be done, organizing, planning, borrowing, and preparing everything for last-minute packing and transporting. Upon arriving at Brown Center, we found our interim sacristy to be a tiny, angular room with no plumbing! We went to work setting up stations, distributing vessels, and hauling water in tubs. After a meaningful Eucharist, the women returned to the sacristy with vessels to be cleaned and restored to their generous lenders. I was thrilled that in this tiny beehive we could perform our duties in such harmony under such adverse conditions. The women were an inspiration. The love of God was present. Everything completed, we packed up and returned all the Cathedral treasures that night. What a marvelous and meaningful end to my term! Thanks be to God and to a wonderful Altar Guild.

I am grateful for the Altar Guild's being the ministry that gave me the opportunity to serve with such spiritual men and women of the cloth and to rub shoulders, as it were, with the mystery of God. Eucharistic symbols and rituals are timeless and will continue to represent the presence of God to the people of God in ways that light our path and enrich our lives.

Amy Ufer joined the Cathedral in 1958; besides serving on the Altar Guild, she has been a Sunday School teacher and a member of the Vestry.