[join me in glad adoration]
In May, at the tail end of the semester just before finals, I got nostalgic, as I inevitably do when there is a journey imminent. I spent an hour googling pictures of St. James cathedral, the church I attended when my family lived in Ohio - the first church I remember, the church and daycare and school around which my life revolved for the fist seven years I remember. I wrote this rather cheesy thing about it, about what I remembered:
"This is the church I went to as a kid, growing up in Lakewood, Ohio. It was within walking distance of my house; I went to the parish school across the street from preschool through second grade, and my brother a little longer. I thought of it today, of how vaguely and yet how powerfully I remember it - the mornings standing outside those triple doors, holding my father’s hand; how instead of listening to the priest most mornings I would stare up at the vaulted ceilings, at the deep, star-spangled firmament and the crowd of apostles around the altar, with their names in flowing mosaic script at their feet. I remember the echo of the ancient kneelers coming down in their dozens and the way the thunder of the organ in my bones was familiar and comfortable to me, even when I was small.
I remember these things and appreciate them like I never did then; I didn’t know when I was small what a gift a cathedral is, how deep into my psyche and my soul this building was carving my religion even when I sat on the hard oak pew and didn’t pay attention. I didn’t know then the importance of the muted gold glow of candles and the thick smell of incense and the shadowed corners between Gothic arches and bells that a whole town could hear, bells that summoned the sleepy hundreds to come and fill up endless stone space with the echoes of their comfortable adoration.
They have closed this church since I lived in Lakewood. The town has shrunk; the diocese has accumulated debts; the old roof threatened to collapse, and there was no money to save it. The parish has been assimilated into a larger one, with fewer, newer churches. They hope that someday they will have enough money to save it, to rebuild it. They do not hope optimistically."
Our second day visiting the family in Ohio - Thursday, I'm pretty sure it was - I picked up the paper over breakfast and there it was, on the front page: Overflow crowd fills St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood to celebrate reopening. 1,400 people showed up on the feast of Saint James to celebrate Mass there for the first time in two years. The parish appealed to the Vatican, and in a move that makes this one of very few times I have felt warmly toward the Church's hierarchy, the Vatican decided that the church was too precious to be closed forever.
Opening day just... happened to be the day we arrived, the one week I have spent in Ohio since Christmas before last and the only one I will spend here for the next two years at least. I am not thinking too hard about this, because I'm pretty sure coincidences are, most of the time, just coincidences - there is less holy wonder in me than just gratitude, to whatever alignment of fortunes put me here, back home, for the first Sunday Mass my cathedral has celebrated since 2010. I was there, third pew from the front, under the deep blue firmament, still barely paying attention to the priest because the paintings and mosaics were still so much more interesting - all the apostles staring down at me like I remembered, the zodiac painted in imperial blue on the domed ceiling, angels crying the names of the virtues on every pillar and crowding out the gargoyles on the arches, St. James in every stained glass window and the Stations of the Cross between them, Sts. Agnes and Lawrence and Our Lady of Grace filling up corners and vestibules and over it all the thick smell of incense and fresh dust.
The church was full. The Mass was bare and simple - volunteer choir, volunteer lectors, one priest and no deacon, no wine, no enveloped, and the sound of the pipe organ replaced with a smaller electric model for the time being. But it... I guess it was a parish that was happy enough just to hear the priest's voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling, to look into the solemn face of the painted Christ behind the altar, to fill that space with the murmur of voices. Cathedrals should never be silent. Cathedrals are made to swallow up sound - to turn every movement, every word, into something small, to emphasize at the same time the vastness of the space it contains and the utter inability of the people inside it to fill it. The most crowded cathedral in the world will always feel large, and to hear hundreds of voices still manage to vanish into that space is... it's powerful. A silent cathedral - an empty cathedral - is just a building, because where there are no people to throw their voices at infinity and listen to them disappear, there might as well be no God.
Yeesh. This is getting long and corny and stupidly obtuse. I just... whether there is a God or not, whether this was the doing of a divine power or just me getting tangled up in a mess of memory and wishful thinking and self-delusion, this was important for me. I guess I need to stop talking about the feelings I had and what I experienced there as though they represent some universal truth, because I'm quite sure they don't - I would like to believe that to stand in that cathedral meant as much to the people around me as it did to me, but I have no way of knowing whether I am as connected to them as my permanence-seeking mind would like to be. But... fuck. There comes a place, in my experience, where description fails, and emotion fails, and any and all attempt to explain the relevance of a moment fails; you just come to a place where all you can do is accept that what is happening is, in some way you cannot define, important and necessary to you, in a way that makes your life seem a richer and more... more shareable thing. People call this different things, depending on who they are and what they believe and where they come from and what they do and how they feel. That's perfectly fine. To me, that place (comes from? is part of? proves? manifests as? connects me to?) God.
This was the opening hymn - not this version, not exactly, because we sang it in first person. It was, I think, relevant in a way that we do not usually experience with hymns, particularly old ones, in these more comfortable times. It was beautiful.
Praise to the Lord, who will prosper our work and defend us!
Surely his goodness and mercy here daily attend us!
Ponder anew what the almighty can do,
Who with his love will befriend us!
"This is the church I went to as a kid, growing up in Lakewood, Ohio. It was within walking distance of my house; I went to the parish school across the street from preschool through second grade, and my brother a little longer. I thought of it today, of how vaguely and yet how powerfully I remember it - the mornings standing outside those triple doors, holding my father’s hand; how instead of listening to the priest most mornings I would stare up at the vaulted ceilings, at the deep, star-spangled firmament and the crowd of apostles around the altar, with their names in flowing mosaic script at their feet. I remember the echo of the ancient kneelers coming down in their dozens and the way the thunder of the organ in my bones was familiar and comfortable to me, even when I was small.
I remember these things and appreciate them like I never did then; I didn’t know when I was small what a gift a cathedral is, how deep into my psyche and my soul this building was carving my religion even when I sat on the hard oak pew and didn’t pay attention. I didn’t know then the importance of the muted gold glow of candles and the thick smell of incense and the shadowed corners between Gothic arches and bells that a whole town could hear, bells that summoned the sleepy hundreds to come and fill up endless stone space with the echoes of their comfortable adoration.
They have closed this church since I lived in Lakewood. The town has shrunk; the diocese has accumulated debts; the old roof threatened to collapse, and there was no money to save it. The parish has been assimilated into a larger one, with fewer, newer churches. They hope that someday they will have enough money to save it, to rebuild it. They do not hope optimistically."
Our second day visiting the family in Ohio - Thursday, I'm pretty sure it was - I picked up the paper over breakfast and there it was, on the front page: Overflow crowd fills St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood to celebrate reopening. 1,400 people showed up on the feast of Saint James to celebrate Mass there for the first time in two years. The parish appealed to the Vatican, and in a move that makes this one of very few times I have felt warmly toward the Church's hierarchy, the Vatican decided that the church was too precious to be closed forever.
Opening day just... happened to be the day we arrived, the one week I have spent in Ohio since Christmas before last and the only one I will spend here for the next two years at least. I am not thinking too hard about this, because I'm pretty sure coincidences are, most of the time, just coincidences - there is less holy wonder in me than just gratitude, to whatever alignment of fortunes put me here, back home, for the first Sunday Mass my cathedral has celebrated since 2010. I was there, third pew from the front, under the deep blue firmament, still barely paying attention to the priest because the paintings and mosaics were still so much more interesting - all the apostles staring down at me like I remembered, the zodiac painted in imperial blue on the domed ceiling, angels crying the names of the virtues on every pillar and crowding out the gargoyles on the arches, St. James in every stained glass window and the Stations of the Cross between them, Sts. Agnes and Lawrence and Our Lady of Grace filling up corners and vestibules and over it all the thick smell of incense and fresh dust.
The church was full. The Mass was bare and simple - volunteer choir, volunteer lectors, one priest and no deacon, no wine, no enveloped, and the sound of the pipe organ replaced with a smaller electric model for the time being. But it... I guess it was a parish that was happy enough just to hear the priest's voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling, to look into the solemn face of the painted Christ behind the altar, to fill that space with the murmur of voices. Cathedrals should never be silent. Cathedrals are made to swallow up sound - to turn every movement, every word, into something small, to emphasize at the same time the vastness of the space it contains and the utter inability of the people inside it to fill it. The most crowded cathedral in the world will always feel large, and to hear hundreds of voices still manage to vanish into that space is... it's powerful. A silent cathedral - an empty cathedral - is just a building, because where there are no people to throw their voices at infinity and listen to them disappear, there might as well be no God.
Yeesh. This is getting long and corny and stupidly obtuse. I just... whether there is a God or not, whether this was the doing of a divine power or just me getting tangled up in a mess of memory and wishful thinking and self-delusion, this was important for me. I guess I need to stop talking about the feelings I had and what I experienced there as though they represent some universal truth, because I'm quite sure they don't - I would like to believe that to stand in that cathedral meant as much to the people around me as it did to me, but I have no way of knowing whether I am as connected to them as my permanence-seeking mind would like to be. But... fuck. There comes a place, in my experience, where description fails, and emotion fails, and any and all attempt to explain the relevance of a moment fails; you just come to a place where all you can do is accept that what is happening is, in some way you cannot define, important and necessary to you, in a way that makes your life seem a richer and more... more shareable thing. People call this different things, depending on who they are and what they believe and where they come from and what they do and how they feel. That's perfectly fine. To me, that place (comes from? is part of? proves? manifests as? connects me to?) God.
This was the opening hymn - not this version, not exactly, because we sang it in first person. It was, I think, relevant in a way that we do not usually experience with hymns, particularly old ones, in these more comfortable times. It was beautiful.
Click to viewPraise to the Lord, who will prosper our work and defend us!
Surely his goodness and mercy here daily attend us!
Ponder anew what the almighty can do,
Who with his love will befriend us!