Reflections on The Episcopal Church amidst Elgar and Evensong

on September 30, 2013

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. – Philippians 4:8 (KJV).

As yesterday afternoon was a particularly beautiful late September day, I decided with my Roman Catholic roommate and an Episcopalian friend of ours to walk down to the Episcopal National Cathedral (officially “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington”) to attend their celebrated Choral Evensong service. Walking down the narrow sidewalks of Massachusetts Avenue, we could not help but joke at the thought of the three of us – all belonging to different Churches – heading to the primatial cathedral of The Episcopal Church (“A Catholic, an Episcopalian, and an Orthodox are walking together down the street. . . what, you’ve never heard of that happening? Never?!”).

With a friend in front of the Cathedral.
With a friend in front of the Cathedral.

As we passed St Alban’s (with a large sign in Spanish encouraging hispanohablantes to attend an evening Spanish-language service) and turned off Wisconsin Avenue onto the Cathedral grounds, I contemplated the gleaming white stone edifice as it rose before us. I cannot hope to recall the number of times I have gazed up at this English Gothic Revivalist church, whether touring it with my family on summer and spring visits to the capital, walking the lush grounds and tranquil Bishop’s Garden with friends, or running around the edge of the vast premises on nighttime jogs.

Gazing up at the Cathedral's western facade.
Gazing up at the Cathedral’s western facade.

It is as much a part of my life and personal memories of DC as are the Roman Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals in which I have worshiped during these four years, though, admittedly, the National Cathedral evokes in me a powerful mix of the sacred and the partisan whenever I pass through its doors. It is a beautiful but strange marker of life for those of us who live in Northwest DC, a kind of conscious status symbol among college students in that one’s approximate proximity to the Cathedral has a perceived strong correlation to one’s overall wealth and degree of establishment. Those of us whose rooftops or balconies afford views of its spires or the ringing of its bells count ourselves among the most fortunate, yet how many of us pass within its precincts unaware of both the rich history here, and the profound shifts currently taking place within its walls?

In all senses of the word, the Cathedral is a uniquely national monument. Construction began 106 years ago before a crowd of some 20,000 on September 29, 1907 in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt (whose second wife and First Lady, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, was an active Episcopalian). The 26th President offered a ceremonial address at the laying of the foundation stone, while the Cathedral would soon come to house the imposing sarcophagus of the 28th, Woodrow Wilson (whose second wife and First Lady, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, was also an active Episcopalian).

President Woodrow Wilson's tomb in the Cathedral. His second wife and First Lady Edith lays buried a few yards away.
President Woodrow Wilson’s tomb in the Cathedral. His second wife and First Lady Edith lays buried a few yards away.

Marble statues in the vestibule depict Washington as Pater Patriae and Lincoln as the defender of the Union. Congress has designated the Cathedral as the “National House of Prayer”, and it has hosted three presidential funerals, visits from numerous heads of state, and, more recently, a vivid addition which captures one of the country’s most triumphant hours: a small piece of moon rock which Neil Armstrong brought back from his 1969 sojourn on the Moon rests in the blue stained-glass Space Window.

Looking toward the rood screen separating the choir stalls and High Altar from the nave.
Looking toward the chancel screen separating the choir stalls and High Altar from the nave.

It stands as the second-largest cathedral in the country, and is the tallest edifice in the nation’s Capital crowning its highest hill. When one crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, whether by Metro rail or one of the road bridges, one may look back over the District of Columbia and spy its stately spires piercing the low skyline. Bearing stones from Solomon’s Quarry in its high Jerusalem Altar, it is a testament by its very grandeur and scale to the historic prestige and expansive influence The Episcopal Church once enjoyed in its heyday, a time when most presidents (or at least their wives), senators, and business leaders not only frequented its churches in times of national turmoil, but counted themselves as active members and friends.

This prestige and influence has certainly waned in recent years in the wake of its well-known experiments with theological liberalism, overt commitment to progressive political activism (from the Dean of its Cambridge, MA Divinity School calling abortion a “blessing”, to its 2012 General Convention approving the ordination of transgendered people as ministers) and a seeming total indifference to any notion of orthodoxy on matters of biblical Christian doctrine and belief. It is a testament either to this shift, or to my roommate’s rather peculiar sense of humor that he jokingly brought a small bottle of Catholic holy water with him on our visit, in order to cleanse himself of any evil presence that might be lurking in the Cathedral. (He declined to use it).

I will have to resign myself to a rather agnostic skepticism on the subject of any evil presence in the depths of the Cathedral, but on the question of the Evensong service itself, I find myself, even now, lost for words, so ethereal were the angelic voices of The Cathedral Choir of Men and Girls. Recalling with pleasure the magnificent arrangements by the choralists Dering and Elgar (both of whom were actually Roman Catholics), and Thomas Williams, Stephen Darlington, and Douglas Major, I can only point in wonder to St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, 4:8 as a reflection of my own sentiments. Turning through the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (Rite One) which accompanied most of the selected hymns, I was struck not only by the dignified majesty of the music being offered only a few feet from me, but the profound theological integrity and undeniably English order and reverent sobriety of the text of this rite, which closely follows the 1928 edition beloved among many Anglo-Catholics.

A more detailed photo of the chancel screen.
A more detailed photo of the chancel screen.

The service followed a distinctly traditional liturgical format, identical to Roman Catholic Vespers, complete with repeated Trinitarian doxologies, dignified hymns, candle-lighting, the singing of the Phos Hilaron, chanting of the Psalms, Old and New Testament readings, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, etc. The only point of awkwardness was my initial surprise at hearing a homily offered by a woman, the officiant Rev. Canon Gina Gilland Campbell. While my surprise at seeing a woman preside over a service and then offer the sermon was only natural (I had never experienced this before), Campbell’s words hardly inspired theological controversy.

Campbell made repeated, sincere references to Christ as God and Lord. It felt strange for me to sit in my seat as she, in closing her benediction, made the Sign of the Cross over all of us, but this was hardly alarming. Rather, her homily’s motif – in which she reflected on the distinction between loneliness, which wants, and has an air of neediness to it, and solitude, which has, and possesses an air of quiet peace and contentedness – seemed particularly apropos given that we were all clustered together in the choir rows, the outer nave of the cavernous building almost empty of people save those who arrived after all the choir rows had filled. As she spoke, I could not help but wonder: as a canon at the Episcopal National Cathedral, did her comments on solitude and loneliness come at all from a place of corporate isolation or loss, in the wake of so many emptying parishes and lawsuits, or out of the sense that, among the service attendees, only a handful of the body were under 30?

Seated in the choir rows near the High Altar.
Seated in the choir rows near the High Altar.

In the same Cathedral, I have sat in awe listening to the sublime polyphony of King’s College Choir, Cambridge, and yet this late September Evensong produced a more intimate ambiance, for the ushers invited us to sit in the choir stalls between the Choir singers and the high altar itself. While I am nothing if not an Anglophile, I was altogether unprepared for the crowning glory of Anglican liturgical worship as offered at the Cathedral. Anglican hymns have delighted and moved me for years, yet in my four years living as a student in Washington, I had never – until yesterday – deliberately attended the Evensong service on a Sunday afternoon.

Although I remain Orthodox, yesterday, more than ever before, John Wesley’s words came alive in my soul: “I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England.” It is not the conclusion of Wesley’s words, but their underlying sentiment, that depth of love and natural affection which engendered him to render them in the first place, which I wholeheartedly share.

Looking to the High Altar with the image of Christ surrounded by Saints and angels.
Looking to the High Altar with the Cross and image of Christ surrounded by Saints and angels.

In short, I cannot recommend the Cathedral’s Evensong services enough. In them breathes a restrained yet transcendent beauty which does nothing but beckon the soul to God. One may do as I did and attend incognito, without giving of one’s money at the collection, and one need not fear any judgmental frowns or insistent stares from the ushers. The divine beauty resonant in the choral service stands for itself and is offered for all without expectation of tithe or token.

In all of this, I could not help but note a strange, almost palpable disconnect between the grand history of the Cathedral – its envisioned importance in national life visible in the vast depths and towering height of the edifice – and the theological, political and economic realities confronting The Episcopal Church today. The paradox in this disconnect was almost surreal, that I should experience the full majesty of Anglican Choral Evensong in the Cathedral which serves as the mother church of one of the most shrunken mainline denominations, whose Presiding Bishop has earned the approbation of those who agree with her and the horror of most others, and whose diocesan Bishop of Washington wrote publicly last March that she somehow believes the essence of Christianity would remain intact were the physical Resurrection of Christ revealed to have never taken place.

TAC’s Rod Dreher notes in this August 3 article that there are some 700,000 U.S. Episcopalians in the pews on Sundays, in comparison to some 22 million Roman Catholics. He observed that, from 2000 to 2010,

. . . The national Episcopal Church lost 23 percent of its Sunday churchgoers — a stunning collapse. Not a single Episcopal diocese in that decade reported growth. Not one.

In the same article, Dreher goes on to quote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of the best-selling Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Hereticswho observes that the same trends which so devastated TEC have come to similarly impact the other mainline denominations:

As Ross Douthat wrote last year:

Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

It fills me with deep sadness that a historic American denomination which is the heir to so much that is laudable and praiseworthy, which has produced such exquisite music and still offers magnificent choral services which point the soul to a higher Truth, could at the same time embrace such profoundly distorted teachings which deny some of the most basic Christian beliefs and doctrines about the nature of man, who God is, and how we come to know Him. It still baffles me that a denomination which for well over a century was a leading fixture in national life, and an established defender of traditional Christian theology, has permitted itself to espouse such radical theological and political ideas without regard to the massive negative impact such embraces have had on their congregational life.

A photo of the service programme.
A photo of the service programme.

Ultimately, the profound disconnect I noticed between the sublime, otherworldly beauty of yesterday’s Choral Evensong service, and the ugliness of The Episcopal Church’s current political and theological situation speaks to a sickness unique to TEC in this moment in time and history. The quiet majesty and dignified reverence of the service stands as a moving reminder of all that is most holy and laudable in the Anglican tradition, and all within this tradition that the Episcopal Church has now confused and lost. As I sat listening to the magnificent music, I found myself asking: how many of those present around me also shared this sense of displacement?

There we sat, perhaps fifty people in a vast Cathedral built to hold thousands, reverently listening to sublime hymns which raised our souls to God, hymns which have their genesis and inspiration in Him who came into the world two thousand years ago. Yet in the very same Cathedral, its clergy somehow believe in the rightness of celebrating ceremonies which purport to bless two men or two women to live in holy matrimony, while others laud legalized abortion as a crucial step in women’s liberation. Still other leading clergy in the denomination, if not the Cathedral, feel entirely comfortable denying the Trinity or questioning the importance of the bodily Resurrection of Christ as a basic tenet of the Christian faith. Bearing this in mind, it is cause for joy and wonderment that such beautiful music should continue to rise to heaven as a treasure of Christian orthodoxy at the center of this Cathedral.

Reflecting on a beautiful afternoon of sacred music, I can only pray that these magnificent Evensong services continue as beacons of Christian orthodoxy in a shrinking denomination struggling with so much that is dark and confused. Preserving unaltered and undiminished a timeless, objective Beauty, which, in turn, points to the spiritual reality and Truth of God as revealed in three Persons, these services are all the more invaluable given the current political and theological climate of The Episcopal Church today. At a time when so many of its leading figures seem increasingly intent on both subtle and not-so-subtle apostasy from anything resembling historic Christianity, Choral Evensong stands as a kind of fortress of Christian orthodoxy. In the ancient chants and stately hymns, and the Book of Common Prayer itself, which has its foundations in the sixteenth century, Evensong has its life and its roots in an earlier time when basic Christian tenets went unchallenged.

So long as Trinitarian doxology and the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed remain in the texts of the BCP, their very presence in the glorious Evensong liturgy indicate a hopeful paradox: no matter what confused exegesis or open heresy any Episcopal bishop or priest might spout in a sermon or interview, the reality is that the Holy Trinity is still worshiped, adored and professed in the most majestic of Episcopal services. Insofar as such reverent worship beckons the soul to God, the very music and rubrics of Evensong will serve as a beacon of Truth to those who choose to remain in The Episcopal Church, while serving as a bridge for those who choose to depart to those Churches which preserve intact such outward beauty, along with the unaltered biblical and historical Christian doctrines which gave life to such beauty in the first place.

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