A TABLE IN THE WILDERNESS: A HARVARD CHAPLAINCY’S SACRED TENT

Photo courtesy of the author.

From the outside, the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard looks like a standard-issue office building: blue-grey paint up to code with the Cambridge historical society, a brick-paved carport leading up to a vivid red door in homage to Anglican tradition. But if you walk through the black metal gate into the backyard, you’ll encounter a structure that reaches across multiple worlds. 

Three wooden triangles flank a wooden platform, illuminated on all sides by color-changing LED lights. A stone altar stands in the middle of the platform. Candles glow from inside glass lanterns at your feet. Join me, if you will, in the Chaplaincy’s sacred tent. 

Part sanctuary, part art installation, part gathering space, the tent’s very existence is a question. Is it temporary or permanent? Inside or outside? Cathedral or campground? 

The answer to all: a resounding yes.

As we remain in exile from our places of worship, many of us have no choice but to seek God outside of church buildings. The Chaplaincy’s sacred tent is a response to this particular challenge of coronatide, yes, and it is also an invitation to reimagine church altogether.

The Rev. Rita Powell, Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard, began to conceptualize the tent last year as a way to challenge churchgoers’ expectations of where they can encounter the divine. Young people’s involvement in church is on a steady decline: a recent survey by the Harvard Crimson found that only 17% of incoming freshmen identified as Protestant in 2019, compared to 20% in 2017. Even students who are looking for meaning or connection to Christianity may feel alienated by traditional church settings, whether they have experienced harm in faith contexts or are simply unfamiliar with sanctuaries and their accompanying norms. For these seekers, the tent offers an alternative -- one that has become even more relevant as churches on and near campus remain closed during the COVID-19 crisis. 

“‘Tent,’ for us, has become shorthand for not-inherited worship space that doesn't come with a lot of weird historical or political baggage [and] meets our evolving needs as Christians,” says Dr. Matthew Gin, architectural historian and a leader of the tent’s design team. 

To conceptualize, design, and construct the tent, Rev. Powell partnered with Dr. Gin, architect Benjamin Bromberg-Gaber, and Dr. Charles M. Stang, head of the Center for the Study of World Religions and professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. The structure intentionally refuses to map onto the shape of a traditional Episcopal sanctuary, yet it is layered with aesthetic meaning drawn from Anglican tradition. 

In this current socially distanced academic year, the tent serves as a site for live-streamed worship and invites creative experimentation with liturgical form. One service might draw on 11th-century rites from the ancient cathedral city of Sarum (modern-day Salisbury), while the next Sunday features a student’s original interpretation of the Phos Hilaron for the vocoder. Post-pandemic, the tent will take on new life as a portable venue for performance, contemplation, and gathering. 

As a young queer person of faith, I have been deeply moved by the tent as a sacred place that can hold both my discomfort with church and my hunger for the divine. The God I encounter in the tent is delightfully queer. I don’t just mean that this God loves gay and trans people, though of course I believe that too. What I mean is that when I’m standing between those triangles, I become more deeply aware that God is too vast, too beautiful, too fluid and prismatic to be contained in a single name, or form, or category. No word or phrase, no matter how well-chosen, can be more than a crude approximation of the transcendent one. 

The word “queer” can feel like this, too: an at-times sloppy shorthand for something deeply varied and complex. As an adjective or noun, it’s often used as an umbrella term for members of the LGBTQ community. Historically, the word has been weaponized against queer and trans people. Yet many wear the title with pride: a provocation, a celebration, a defiant reclamation. 

As a verb, “to queer” something can mean to dissolve the binary notions or boundaries that lie beneath it. In our journey with the tent this semester, the Chaplaincy community explored the theme of “wilderness”: both the literal natural world and the metaphorical wilderness we find ourselves traversing now in COVID times. For many of us in the United States, “wilderness” conjures up images of a romantic frontier, unscathed by human hands. But what happens when we blur the line between so-called “untouched” nature and ourselves? 

The tent is an inside that is outside, a human construction in an urban setting where nevertheless hawks soar overhead and wild mushrooms sprout up underfoot. Its presence disrupts the built-natural dichotomy, turning our attention to what William Cronon calls “the wildness in our own backyards...the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see it?” How does our relationship to wilderness change when we think of ourselves not as separate from it, but as much a part of it as gaping canyons or majestic forests? What does it mean to live in communion with all created things, knowing we, too, are of Creation?

The boundaries between the human and non-human world are more permeable than they appear, but it’s true that we have left an indelible mark on the ecosystems that support us. This summer’s devastating wildfires are just one example of the real consequences human activity can have on the world around us. Yet, for centuries before Europeans violently displaced Native Americans and appropriated this land, tribal communities stewarded the forests that have burned so disastrously in recent years. Settler entities like the US Forest Service are now finally calling for interventions like prescribed fires, native grass seeding, and tree thinning - practices that indigenous caretakers have utilized for thousands of years. Today’s environmental disasters then, are not an inevitable consequence of human presence, but a product of empire. 

Which leads us to our third and final definition: “to queer,” as in to subvert, or disrupt entrenched norms, structures, and systems. To queer is to bring what is at the margins to the center. It is to make strange what has been normalized. It is to cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lift up the humble. 

These are the words on Mary’s lips in the Magnificat, a reminder that disruption is sacred and our bodies are a channel for divine reimagination. The tent turns deeply held assumptions about sacred space upside down, challenging everything we think we know about where God lives and how to find her. Rev. Powell describes the tent as “a structure which can point us both inward, to the sacred body each of us carries, the sacred body of the gathered ones, and outward, to the world itself as the dwelling of God.” The dwelling of God is not the cathedral, but the created world and our bodies within it.

The sacred tent is an embodied offering to a God whose power is not fear or control, but love. It is not an answer to the limits of the institutional church, but rather an ongoing invitation to question our inheritance, spoken in a queerer tongue. God did not simply relocate from church to tent. (After all, a newly inscribed binary is a binary nevertheless.) The tent is merely a portal, through which we can learn to seek and respond to the divine, whatever strange and wondrous form it takes.