Many Saints

It was great to see a friend of mine featured on the TypePad home page today - her blog, Third House Journal, is a personal blog which has been a steady presence in my online world; she's a fellow New Englander and very good writer and poet, though she doesn't often post her poems. And a very good person, if not yet a saint - though with all the stuff she's been through this year she's well on her way.

Another good friend writes today that she's taken up the challenge of NaBloPoMo and committed to try to post something every day in November. I'm tempted to follow suit, but not sure I can do it with the amount of work coming up, plus my duties at qarrtsiluni, where there's an intriguing new theme starting. When TheCassandraPages were young, I always posted daily, but for the past couple of years that's been pretty close to impossible, except for stretches when I had a series going. Last November was one of those times: I wrote a post every day for a month, exploring my memories of my mother -- speaking of saints -- and the maternal side of my family.

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Tonight I went with my friend B. to the High Mass observance of All Saint's at St. John the Evangelist  across Av. President Kennedy from Place des Arts. Known locally as the Red Roof Church, St. John's is Anglo-Catholic and tonight was filled with what we Anglicans call "smells and bells" - incense, tall candles, Sanctus bells, chants, and a sung mass by Tomas de Vittoria. The prayer books and hymnals are the small ones, bound in red and green, virtually the same as in Anglo-Catholic churches I've attended in England, with the old rites and prayers I remember from my childhood, barely preserved now in the Rite I liturgies in the American BCP. At one point B. leaned over and said, "As you see, the service moves along at a good clip here," he was right. I know most of these prayers "for all sorts and conditions of men" by heart, and although this is not where I feel most at home spiritually or politically, there was something beautiful and comforting in listening to the well-sung chants, watching the slow dance of the three priests moving in unison at the high altar, and repeating Thomas Cranmer's poetic words while gazing up at the five sanctuary candles burning in their elaborate brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling or following the tracery of the wrought iron and wooden rood screen separating the nave (and the people) from the chancel (the altar, the priests, the mystery.)

It was cold, too, and there was an Advent feeling in the air. After coming back from the communion rail, where I studied the very old, intricately-patterned colored tile floor, I decided it reminded me of being back in England at one of the old city churches, like St. George's Bloomsbury, with its grey-haired congregation wrapped in coats throughout the service, and that rather dour inwardness dissolving into a cheerful, plucky atmosphere afterwards, with red-waistcoated or woolen-skirted greeters pressing mince pies and mulled cider into a visitor's hands on Christmas morning. The kinship with St. John's is not only in the British heritage, but the fact of a small congregation saddled with, and rather dwarfed by, a large, dark, drafty building of stone and brick and dark wood.

This evening there was a casserole supper after the service, so I stayed and ate in the bright parish hall, talking to two Greek Orthodox men, my friend, a McGill professor, and the jovial rector, who had taken off his robes and now wore a floor-length, fitted, Jesuit-style black cassock buttoned down the front with many tiny buttons.

Although St. John's doesn't seem quite ready for women priests at the altar, a female Anglican priest did give the sermon, taking us on a thoughtful journey into the catacombs of Rome where many early saints of the church were buried, along with that cloud of unknown Christian witnesses who we remembered, along with our own dead, on All Saint's Day. My friend B. pointed out, over dinner, that there is a fresco in one of those catacombs that shows five women presiding over a table spread with loaves and fishes. Were they, perhaps, female priests, and this was a first-century Eucharist? It could certainly be so, but the Catholic Church, of course, explained the painting away as an agape supper, a ritual house supper that was shared by early Christians but didn't qualify  - in the absence of sanctified male priests - as a Eucharist.

Tonight, the priest on his right listened, raised his eyebrows, smiled, and didn't say anything; B. smiled a bit more broadly, enjoying ruffling the feathers. The question is actually timely: while traditional Catholic and Anglican parishes all the province are emptying, groups of young people are forming their own house churches, sharing bread and fellowship, prayer, meditation, and community. The hunger for meaning and the questions of faith and spirit are still there, but the churches have failed to read the signs, failed to connect, and failed to adjust: I think the warmth may have left the sanctuaries and gone elsewhere, looking for the next generation of anonymous saints.

Comments

[Dave]

Steady presences:
a friend, a journal, the smile
of a silent priest.

[Fred Garber]

Very thought provoking post. I must say I kind of like a big cold stone church. I walk in from the outside where it is dark and cold. I sit down and everyone is bundled up. The lighting is muted. As the service progresses the warmth and the light increases. I loose myself in my own thoughts during the homily. When the prayers are offered up for the deceased I listen for the name that I added(my wife who is in Mexico asked that I add the name...she will be visiting the person's grave). By the time communion is over I am warm and ready for some hot chocolate and day of the dead bread.
I know that the churches have problems and I am troubled by many things that I see. But tonight I have come for the sacrifices and all has gone well. And I felt the warmth. I pray that we all find some warmth and comfort.

[margaret]

What a lovely description of the church and the service. It brought to life a familiar setting and scene and the feelings invoked by that old and beautiful liturgy many of us still recall and cherish deeply.

[beth]

Thank you, Dave. Yes, c'est ça.

Fred, thank you for writing this wonderful description of your own experience. I hope I didn't imply that I didn't like the cold stone churches, because I do. You're right about the warmth and light increasing as the service moves along - both because they actually do, and because you feel more at home. The warmth increases in the atmosphere of shared worship and prayer, and it also increases within, so we leave, hopefully, with more than we came with.

Hi Margaret! I'm glad this post resonated with you.It had been a long time since I was " not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table" but I love the prayer, and all that language, actually. I suppose that the literary Anglican speaking, but still - we've dumbed down our language so much over the past century, instead of teaching good English words to each generation. No wonder Johnny can't read any of the classics, let alone Shakespeare or English poetry. It pains me, but what's to be done?

[leslee]

Thank you, Beth. I am blushing at the sudden, unexpected attention. I suppose it's one of those things that comes when you least try for it and just do what you do. Nice to hear, though, that it's appreciated.

Lovely church description. I haven't been able to feel connected in a church in a very long time, though I was was a pretty devout Catholic. We are having a memorial Mass for my mother in a college chapel, which should be nice and intimate. And I feel grateful to that community for going out of their way to help us out with it. That's the thing we miss when we don't belong to a church - the community.