Uprooted and growing
By Elliot Ritzema
When I tell people who are familiar with Nashotah House that I’m a residential student there, they will often ask, “What year?” (Those who are unfamiliar will ask something more basic, like “Nashwhatwhere?”) Since almost all the residential students are in the Master of Divinity program, the assumption is that I will answer: “Junior,” “Middler,” or “Senior.” Then I explain that, no, I’m a rarer bird: a residential Master of Sacred Theology student. You don’t have to join the residential community to do an STM; you could take all the classes you need as one-week intensives. So, it’s natural to ask a follow-up question: “Why?”
The short answer is that I had the freedom to relocate, and I thought I could grow here, but the longer answer begins with how I came to be looking to move in the first place. In the fall of 2022, I was working as a book editor in Washington state. I had a job, a community, and a place to live. I was comfortable, but I was not content; I began to fear that I would blink and 20 years would go by with no meaningful change or growth. I could see myself relaxing into the comfortable consumer lifestyle that is the default way of being in America, and I rebelled. Pulling up roots and moving to Nashotah could be seen as the more rigorous, intensive option, and it wasn’t easy. But staying where I was would have been the more demanding option—it would have demanded that I ignore the voice telling me that following Jesus required more of me.
Since moving here, I have found that Nashotah is a good place to grow. The rhythms of worship, study, and work make it so that you can orient yourself around love of God and others. But growth isn’t inevitable even here; you can be in residence at Nashotah and get bored. You can distract yourself here. You can look for things to complain about here. You can become cynical. You can stand in chapel and recite the creed while wondering what’s for breakfast, and you can dig your knees into the floor and recite prayers while having a heart that’s more focused on how you look to your neighbors than it is attending to God. Even here, you can slide into despair about the state of the church or of theological education.
So, it isn’t just the repeated actions of our community life that I’ve found foster growth at Nashotah. On a deeper level, there is the conviction that what happens here matters. It is meant to reflect, however partially and imperfectly, the way the world was made to be and the way humans were made to live in it.
The philosopher Charles Taylor coined the term “social imaginary” to describe our background assumptions, the way we collectively imagine reality to be in a secular age. I was occupying one kind of social imaginary before I came here, and I wasn’t sure that coming here for a week at a time could give me enough escape velocity to launch into a different one. I was living in a story in which prosperity, technique, and comfort were the values that drove life, and I needed to be transported into a different one.
Years ago, when I was getting a Master of Divinity and taking a Preaching and Worship class, another student asked the professor how it was possible to keep the liturgy fresh and engaging for people if you’re in a tradition where it is largely set. The professor gave a few suggestions, but the most important thing, he said, “is having a believing priest”—someone who believes that the actions performed in the liturgy are not just things we’ve decided to do, but are worship directed to a God who exists and is worthy of our worship. When I visited Nashotah and worshiped in St. Mary’s, I sensed the difference having a believing priest, and believing worshipers, made. More than anything else, that’s why I thought, “I could grow here.” The people here believe that God exists, that Scripture is a reliable way to know him, that Christ died for our sins and was raised and is present to us in the Eucharist. That belief is what gives an electric charge to our worship, even though there are days when we feel more engaged than others—days where we perform the actions even though we don’t feel it. But if we believe what we’re doing matters, and we continue to do it day after day, it will shape us even when the feeling isn’t there.
Coming here was a big change, for sure. But I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a relief to sell my furniture, pack up my remaining things, and come live a life that, to outward appearances, seems much more constrained. Distractions were pulling me from worship and meaning, and I was at a place in my life where I could, and needed to, reduce them drastically.
I don’t know how long I’ll be in residence or what comes after the STM. It could be that I will continue in my same job, editing books for a living. But for as long as I’m here, I’m observing closely and engaging fully in rhythms of prayer, work, and community life, and thinking about how I can continue to occupy this kind of social imaginary— one oriented around worship and devotion to Christ—wherever I go next.
