August 8, 2007 3rd Month of the last Sabbatical

Oxford Street and St. Paul’s

Oxford St. in London is more cosmopolitan, crowded, and commercially active than Times Square, Fisherman’s Warf, or Michigan Avenue, or any other American venue of its kind. Like them, it is lined with stores selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, electronics, and souvenirs, but its multi-racial clientele speaks more languages and is generally more glamorous and decked-out. Families on holiday, groups of animated women, and loud teenagers, mostly French, all make their way through the crowds with supreme self-confidence, ignoring everyone but their own companions, all spending, eating, talking, all but one Muslim man who stood out in his gown and skullcap, who carried no plastic bags of merchandise, but strode purposefully through the crowd that seemed to part before him.

At the east end of this thoroughfare rises St. Paul’s Cathedral, protected from the busloads of tourists by a contingent of uniformed attendants who, every day around 5:00pm, bar the door to all but devotees of Evensong. Disappointed tourists turn away angry, like all shoppers deprived of an opportunity to spend. Only the devout minority (numbering about 300), are permitted to queue up, in good English style, and wait to be admitted into the chancel where the daily service occurs. Do they even know what they are waiting in line for? Perhaps not, but, whatever it is, they know it is a bargain, for Evensong-goers are absolved from paying the hefty admission fee.

As I waited with them, my eye wandered over the vast interior, crowded with memorial plaques and tombs of various national figures, some famous but most just well-connected. A thought occurred to me, as it has to others, no doubt: how will Britain’s current crop of celebrities be memorialized? I dare say it will not be at St. Paul’s, because there is no space left! Then again, would the notables of today even want to be recognized in such a way, alongside the members of the famous charging Light Brigade, the first Anglican Bishop of India, and the Duke of Wellington? Preoccupied with such weighty thoughts I looked down at the memorial plaque etched into the floor at my feet, and was startled to find I was standing on the grave of Charles Darwin! A curious place, St. Paul’s, and hard to categorize. It is part museum, part mausoleum, part storage-closet.

Whatever else it may be, St. Paul’s is a place of worship, and after some time a verger ascended the pulpit, and, using the PA system, instructed us in the most elegant of accents to occupy choir stalls in the chancel, leaving space only for the “Vicars Choral,” the male portion of the Cathedral Choir who were to sing the service that evening. As instructed, I found a choir stall beside a very nice Canadian woman and her daughter, and we sat as the vast building gradually fell quiet.

The first sign of liturgical life was a growl from the cathedral organ that I felt in my feet and back before I could actually hear it with my ears. Soon the voices of the Vicars Choral could be heard from out under the cathedral dome, singing a Latin introit, and from that point on I became lost in a familiar liturgical landscape, a country where all boundaries melt away as chanted psalm verses merge imperceptibly with silence. Then, with the last “…world without end. Amen” still lingering in the air, from some unseen lectern a disembodied English voice began with faultless diction to inform us of the doom pronounced upon “ruthless nations” by the Prophet Isaiah. Are we to suppose this prophecy applies to the demise of the British Empire? If so, this huge building represents the remnant of its spiritual capital, and this elegant act of worship its requiem, witnessed now by a congregation of tourists, survivors of a day on Oxford Street.

The cathedral organ is undergoing massive reconstruction involving a forest of scaffolding, and the musician plays the instrument, Oz-like, from behind a curtain, saving thunderous crescendos for special moments, our souls serving as the wizard’s playthings, swooped up to dizzying heights of joy and surrender, and then abandoned in mid-air for some sedate doodling and harmless chords. We plummet to earth without a parachute, but finding ourselves still intact, at once begin to long for another dose, another turn on the thrill ride.

It is like an addiction, a yearning for more that cannot be fully satisfied- an awareness all the more strange since only a few minutes earlier, I (we?) were wondering how much longer this bible reading would last, how soon this period of silence would end, when something, anything, would happen.

This is religion in its purist form: ecstatic boredom, ruthless beauty, elaborate simplicity, unfinished completeness. I wonder: is the organist a tool of God, a sacramental agent? A means by which God descends upon a cacophonous world to render it harmonious, coherent, and beautiful? Is that unseen musician like the man in a skullcap, wielding an unseen authority? Or is the Man Behind the Curtain a charlatan? An Oxford Street merchant in an archaic store? A dealer in cheap addictive drugs?

Isaiah has the last word: all the ruthless nations of the Eighth century B.C.E. have come and gone, their cities have fallen and will never be rebuilt. What seems to endure is the very last, exquisite and unresolved chord of the organ postlude.

I return a few days later with my friends, one of whom is an organist and respected colleague of many years. My spiritual appetite has grown sharper in the past few days, and I am eager, desperate, almost, to share the intoxicating reality of this musical place with them. But it soon becomes evident that there is to be no choir, no organ. The Service will be said this evening, as the musicians are all on holiday. Should I feel so disappointed, like a child who, expecting to be offered an ice cream sundae, must settle for a chiclet? Am I a disappointed shopper, too late for the Big Sale? Here is Oxford Street, possessing my soul, right here in the bowels of the Cathedral. What, God cannot arrive without the wizard’s conjuring?

I apologize to U, scourge of empires, author of harmonies: the final chord still hangs unfinished in the air, with U inhabiting the emptiness as I share this moment with my friends.