When Bill and Angela James asked me if I would like to be the Episcopalian Chaplain to the Chautauqua Institution this summer, I had difficulty understanding what I was being asked to do. Now that I have been (and loved it), I have similar difficulty explaining to people what it was all about. Chautauqua is a town near Buffalo in New York State which hosts a summer season of lectures, seminars, worship, arts and sporting activities. Think: Hay Literary Festival meets Glyndebourne meets the Greenbelt Christian Festival. Thousands of people visit Chautauqua through the season and many families have been “Chautauquans” for generations. Popular with East Coast liberals and centred around ideas and culture, one might say it is not dissimilar to Hampstead!
The town itself is stunningly picturesque in a classically American way. It’s got rocking chairs on pretty porches and Stars & Stripes hanging from ornate wood-clad houses. My responsibilities for the week centred on the daily liturgies at the charming Episcopalian Chapel of the Good Shepherd. I preached each morning on passages related to the overall theme of the week, “What makes us moral?” I found the congregations very thoughtful, appreciative and impressively large for 7.45am!
The main speakers were of an extremely high calibre and the highlight for me being the Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. He exhorted us to overcome indifference to suffering and hunger, to “think higher and feel deeper.” We were also treated to expert speakers on the moral dimensions of neuroscience, literature and international law. But religion is also integral to Chautauqua and among several interesting contributors we were addressed by the Bishop of New Hampshire who has achieved notoriety for being the first openly gay and partnered bishop in the Anglican Communion. He also popped up in Chapel the following morning!
It was this total integration of religion with all the other fascinating areas of contemporary thought that most impressed me about Chautauqua. It is ironic that Christianity has long been far more marginalised in our country where the church is established than in the United States where there is supposed church/state divide. I long to see this kind of mainstream discussion of the reality of God and God’s purposes for our lives as part of our everyday discourse. It struck me that Chautauqua is a very healing place because it recognises that along with the stimulation of the mind and the recreation of the body, religious narrative is an essential component of a holistic life.
Chatauqua Summer
Jim Walters