Well Well Well is Seattle Met’s regular health and wellness column, covering the sometimes surprising ways we can support our physical, emotional, social, and environmental well-being.

I’ve lived two miles away from St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral for more than a decade now, but it took a book written by an author who was born in Switzerland, grew up in Montreal, and lives in Washington, DC, to alert me to something special that’s been happening there every Sunday since 1956.

In The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith details her visit to St. Mark’s on Capitol Hill to see the Compline Choir, which sings an ancient monastic prayer service. Compline comes from the Latin word completorium, meaning “completion”—and is also known as Night Prayer. Though it’s most commonly heard in monasteries, all are welcome to the Seattle service.

“Compline attracts people seeking refuge from the white noise of daily life,” Smith writes. “They find meaning by coming together in a community and surrendering themselves to the music, to the silence, to the divine.”

What I found interesting about Smith’s description is that the event attracts believers and nonbelievers alike, first gaining ground with hippies in the 1960s. Today, there are plenty of people who attend even though they don’t resonate with the religious specifics of the message—which you can read beforehand on the Compline Underground blog—but still get something out of it. “What happens at St. Mark’s is unique,” Smith writes. “People in our society are growing increasingly alienated from mystical and transcendent sources of meaning.”

When the service began in the 1950s, it was the first time Compline had been chanted for the public in the United States. Now, you can find it in more than 30 states, with many choirs modeling their services after Seattle.

On a recent drizzly Sunday evening, about five dozen people were scattered in pews, on chairs, and on benches lining the walls of St. Mark’s, but many had brought blankets and pillows to lie on the floor. (A woman from Marysville told me blankets are nice, but yoga mats are the true key.) The lights were off, except for the amber hues coming from the high-hanging chandeliers. Inside the cavernous walls, massive concrete columns held up the wood-beam ceiling, and there was a soft glow from the arched windows, made up of square panes of purple, yellow, blue, and clear glass. While the muted interior strikes some as drab during the day, at night, the neutral palette provides a calming sense of simplicity.

Before the service began, it was completely silent, save for a few hushed whispers. With a start time of 9:30pm, it felt different from church in the morning, which is often brimming with energy and excitement for a day that’s just beginning. This was much quieter and more introspective.

Members of the Compline Choir are all male-identifying, though there is a women’s version that occasionally performs, usually when the main choir is traveling. The commitment is serious, requiring at least 44 Sundays a year, and membership is considered to be for life. All are volunteers.

One of those is Scott Fikse, the newest member of the choir. He joined in 2022 but was involved in a similar choir in Honolulu for about a decade before that.

For him, there’s a spiritual element to choral singing—with its breathing in unison and coming together to create a unified sound—that he wishes more people could experience. “Sharing a space with a group is a really powerful way of connecting with people,” Fikse says.

Last year, the choir traveled to England, which gave them an opportunity to lean into the historical aspect of what they do. “When you go and sing in a choir stall in, say, Canterbury Cathedral, and somebody sat in that same choir stall and sang that same music that you’re singing now 300 years ago, what an incredible connection to the past and tradition to be a part of,” he says.

A doctoral student in choral conducting at the University of Washington, Fikse says there are “dyed-in-the-wool devoted churchgoers” who have been singing Compline for decades, along with those who don’t subscribe to a particular faith but want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

“There’s a lot of liturgical and theological richness to what we do—for people who have been reared in the church and connect in that way, this is very authentic and powerful,” Fikse says. “For people who aren’t religious, the experience of being still and having the opportunity to pause is super important.”

One Seattleite I met who’s gone to Compline a few times says he doesn’t identify as Christian, but he still derives value from attending. “Musical traditions have evolved over generations because they resonate with something in us on a visceral level,” he told me. “It’s a gorgeous space, and the way the music fills it puts you in a contemplative place.”

The choir sings modern music by living composers alongside ancient compositions. At the end of each rehearsal, they read prayer requests that have been sent in for people going through something difficult. During the service, they chant those names.

Each service is available via live stream and on the radio, but there’s something about being there in person that’s hard to replicate. Blessed with good acoustics, the cathedral was filled by the rich, layered sound, enveloping everyone in attendance—similar to the experience of a sound bath. All the songs were beautiful, but there was a particular moment where the harmonies came together in such a way that I felt the vibrations course through my body. It grabbed my attention and kept it in a way few things do these days, in our world of constant distractions. Though the service was only about 30 minutes, time felt more expansive while I was focused on simply listening and being.

That experience you can have as an attendee is only heightened for those who are members of the choir. “It’s more important than ever that we have these opportunities to pause for our mental health and spiritual wellness,” Fikse says. “To really slow down for a few hours on a Sunday night and just be present with each other, with music, with the space of the cathedral, with ourselves—and to remove all the extraneous stimuli that we’re constantly bombarded with—is one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves.”