Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 10

Working on God
by Winifred Gallagher

(Page 10 of 11)

At a loss about how to reapproach Christianity but determined to go someplace and do something, I join six thousand other people and several hundred remarkably composed dogs in New York City's huge Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine for a celebration of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa's ecologically correct cousin. In an astoundingly beautiful liturgy that could rival any Lincoln Center performance, more than a dozen choirs, two dance companies, African drummers, the voices of humpback whales and timber wolves, and most of the passengers from Noah's ark join the Paul Winter Consort in celebrating Winter's festive Missa Gaia, or Earth Mass. When a black musician rises from clouds of incense to blow into a great white conch shell, the flower-strewn altar swarms with masked bird-dancers preening in brilliant spandex and feathers. Preceding the bearers of the ceremonial bread and wine, the drummers march down the two-block-long nave behind leaping dancers in golden sarongs. "Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est" (Where abideth charity and love, God is ever there), sings the choir, mixing Gregorian, Yoruba, and Khemitic chants. Finally, in a breathless quiet, an elephant, looking as intricate and elegant as a jewel in the vast space, leads a procession of animals-camel, monkey, owl, llama, boa constrictor, hawk, even a hive of bees-down the aisle, radiating a magical civility and the wonder of creation that intoxicated St. Francis.

Under this glorious sensory bombardment, it's simply impossible to remain disengaged. The crowd reflects the cathedral's position, literally straddling impoverished Harlem and privileged Columbia University and figuratively, a staid WASP institution and the new urbanized, pluralistic America. If some here profess a devout Christianity, surely many have, like me, drifted away from it after childhood. Others, like my "half-Jewish" husband and our children, have never had a religion to reject. No matter what our backgrounds, we sway, weep, clap, hug, smile, exclaim, cheer. Thousands of strangers clasp hands and raise our voices in harmony. Better than the most eloquent preaching, we create an eschatological tableau that evokes Christianity's Great Commandment, drawn from the Torah: to love the Creator and the created as oneself.

Sitting in the church for three hours, I have plenty of time to take in the iconography of millennial religion. Along with the usual statues and holy pictures, the small shrines flanking the great nave hold AIDS and Holocaust memorials, fossils, a giant crystal, a bronze bison, a sculpture of the Wolf of Gubbio once tamed by St. Francis, and the living flora and fauna of the Hudson River aquarium. The Poets' Corner includes the names of Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers not known for their conventional piety. The church bulletin lists not only traditional liturgical and community services, but also a healing ministry, an environmental studies center, and a pastoral psychotherapy program. The Sh'ma Israel, which is perhaps Judaism's quintessential prayer, is sung at the Scripture readings, and the ranks of religious dignitaries include not only black and female priests and ministers, but Zen monks and Native American spiritual leaders. From the great sunflower-decked pulpit, Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu sage, offers a prayer: "Om. God, there's nothing but you. Help us see all the unity in diversity."

The cathedral's millennial tone is largely the doing of the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, its dean. (He has since left that position to run an interfaith center in New York.) Over the past twenty-five years, the dean, a large, glamourous, open-natured Harvard man by way of Texas, re-created the cathedral variously as the church of peace, urban activism, the arts, the environment, and religious tolerance. Throughout his swashbuckling ministry, many doubters of high and low degree, from East Side grandes dames to street people, were lured into church by the dean's way of showing God's "kingdom" rather than talking about it. Exuberantly going about his business-championing low-income housing, vamping at a society wedding, exhibiting an image of a crucified woman, weeping unashamedly at prayer-the dean became a poster boy for a certain brand of Christianity-indeed, millennial religion. Where many saw broad-mindedness, warmth, and innovative spirit, however, others found imprudence and a religious promiscuity, if not heresy. Even his supporters allow that the dean occasionally drove them crazy. Nonetheless, as one priest later tells me, "On their deathbed, everyone wants Jim. I sure would."

Later, trying to explain how the St. Francis liturgy somehow re-created the Garden of Eden before the Fall, I come up with two elements: an unfamiliar sense of self and others, and a hint of something else. Most intriguingly, the magic had nothing to do with believing the unbelievable, but came from trusting one's own experience of mystery. Perhaps the final blessing, given by Dean Morton, says it best: What we experienced was "the peace and joy that passeth all understanding."

Impressed, but still not ready for traditional Sunday services, I return several times to the cathedral for vespers. The church's early-evening office, or prayer rite, is traditionally conducted in candlelight. The flames are meant to represent God's power over chaos, and perhaps our proper place in a universe in which we are but flickers. Vespers is particularly soothing when one enters the church in daylight and leaves in darkness. Throughout the ritual, the setting sun progressively dims the great nave and brightens the candles, wordlessly replacing us into nature's diurnal rhythms, which the city's glitter and round-the-clock light often overwhelm. By gently recognizing realities, from the sunset to our day's-end fatigue to the many others in need of prayers, vespers restores my sense of place in the world and stirs a longing for something larger that contains us all. In the old stone church, listening to the ethereal medieval and Renaissance music, I recall C. S. Lewis's observation that we can't give up on the idea of heaven because our own experience suggests it.

One evening, the short homily is given by Canon John Luce, who artfully distinguishes between religion and spirituality. The problem with institutional religion, he says, is that it "often keeps Jesus locked up in the church and out of the world, which doesn't jibe with his teaching at all." But the church has a good side: community. To Canon Luce, "spirituality" means "I don't need the church because I can go to God directly," yet Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, came from organized religion, not spirituality. He tells about walking down Chrystie Street in New York's tough Lower East Side one day with Dorothy Day, "who had nothing-a chair, some cookies." They encountered a hideous, stinking, sore-covered beggar. Day embraced him tenderly and chatted with him for a few minutes. When they proceeded on their way, Luce asked, "Who is that?" She said, "Why, John, it's Jesus." Imagining myself in Day's shoes, my heart sinks. Throwing up his arms, the priest says, "It's because we're Christians that we can embrace all others regardless of differences. We do it because that's what Jesus does."

Copyright © 2000 by Winifred Gallagher.

About the Author

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.