August 4, 2007. Month 3 of The Last Sabbatical

Before leaving for Great Britain I wrote about “sacred enchantment” and the “vast domed spaces” that have symbolized it in my dreams. Strange, then, to find that “vast domed space” existing within sight of the hotel where we stayed in London! Well, not literally “domed”, but certainly high-steepled, massive, and visible all over the neighborhood. Catching a glimpse of it as I exited the underground, I surmised it must be St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, an Anglican church not unknown to the guidebooks but definitely off the beaten path.

What I found was a building of cathedral-like dimensions, surrounded by a large, green park, and surmounted by many towers of varying heights. In the yard stood a larger-than-life Calvary, its solemn grimness accentuated by vases of faded flowers wilting on its stone steps. Obviously, those who established St. Augustine’s meant it to be a place where religion is not to be taken lightly.

The only sign of life was an open gate in the iron fence surrounding the property, but a sign indicated that “the church will be open for a period before each service,” an event that was to take place shortly, as the hour for “Evening Prayer and Rosary” was about to arrive. Once inside, the dim interior revealed numerous shrines with flickering candles, side altars, and the ubiquitous feel of incense. A large shrine to Our Lady of Sorrows dominated the south aisle, summoning memories of my youthful attraction to that doleful devotion. There seemed to be a mantle of Marian influence cast over this space, like the veils shrouding the many Muslim women in the neighborhood. At St. Augustine’s, “sacred enchantment” revealed a distinctly feminine side.

Evening Prayer was said in choir, with the two clergy reciting from the Roman Breviary and coaching me as required, their mellifluous English voices answering one another like twin waterfalls on converging creeks. Parts of the office were chanted in Latin, and as I joined in soto voce I found myself with disbelief suspended, watching my own imagination take flesh before my eyes, regretting the end of every psalm and every reading, every canticle and every prayer. If it were not for Nancy and the children to hold me in existence, I might have disappeared for good into the silence between the psalm-verses, and become another mute spectator among the apostles posted along the chancel walls. In a way, I am there still, suspended somewhere between the vaulted ceiling and the frescoed walls, a lingering molecule of incense-flavored air, having been burned alive and martyred on hot coals at that place where (as my brother Bob says) myth and reality intersect, and (as I have written before), “…all the stories and the rivers merge, and sleep rolls like breakers on an unknown shore.”

My goodness, whatever happened to “sacred irreverence?” Scarcely any of that to be found written above. But it remains, nonetheless. These ultramontanist clergy are admirers of a different Roman Church than the one I have experienced in the US, where heavy-handed authoritarianism infantilizes the laity and leaves many clergy stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence. And I wonder, is it possible to maintain such a complex shrine as this without blocking out much of reality? Complicated worship, as Thomas Cranmer observed, puts all power in the hands of a liturgical elite, and makes passive consumers out of the most laity. Indeed, the C of E in general exhibits this characteristic, and it would be easy to become a “sampler of religious products,” hopping from one splendid edifice to another in search of musical perfection and liturgical excellence. Clericalism, like any top-heavy ideology, can create some very unhealthy dynamics. At the church I served in the 60’s, the elaborate worship went on unabated while the senior clergy lost themselves in self-destructive behavior. At the time, I blamed the professional choir and fussy liturgics, but what was truly lacking was someone to tell the truth about blatantly dysfunctional behavior. You might say they needed Jesus at that church. Or AA. Or maybe they are the same thing.

Yet if Jesus is anywhere he is at St. Augustine’s, and the clergy there struck me as being the “real thing,” men of God, not unhappy, cynical, or in denial. The congregation that worshipped there was eclectic, affectionate, and extremely devout. There was a sense that something truly extraordinary was happening in the course of the Liturgy, a quality that I want very much to replicate in my own approach to worship, more than in the past.

Yet (my irreverent self interjects) that quality is something (not exactly a “thing”) that enters the church with the people; it is not an alien “thing” we must “conjur up” at the altar and impose upon people. “It” is “already present,” and our task to be receptive and attentive, to remove obstacles, not to play God and invent “religious experiences.” Besides, if people are not exactly clamoring for a chance to take part in the daily office, why not chant parts of it in Latin? It’s just the sort of odd behavior that throws the world out of balance, and creates an opening for the wild Spirit to break in. It takes some drastic magic to enchant a world as thoroughly muggled-up as Oxford Street and Picadilly Circus. Anyway, it worked on me.

My encounter with St. Augustine’s was an accident, like Anglicanism, like meeting Nancy at the pharmacy, like discovering St. Michael’s Farm at a parish coffee-hour. Such “accidents” are the stuff of grace, and I put my trust in them.

Beneath the Cathedral 1988 The National Cathedral

Beneath this chthonic cathedral where tourists swarm like

young bees

in a subterranean chapel domed by solid rock,

I wait

And know

I have been here before.

For this is a stone-dream, wherein

I travel through some small drab towns,

And come upon a huge and multi-leveled church:

It is my church,

And I belong.

The paint peels; candles flicker at the shrines;

A vested celebrant waits in dim sunlight

At the end of a corridor.

But I pass down to the lower depths.

I come to a vast, domed space,

So hollow, so intensely hollow,

And in my sleep I find myself aroused, like in some

adolescent dream.

And then I have two bodies, one an outer husk or shell,

another exactly mirroring the first,

enclosed.

Is this stone a womb, where I re-live my own passionate

conception, and life in vitreo?

Am I an egg, waiting for some rendezvous?

Here in the Arimathean’s cave, I wait to see.