A Little Stretching

So, yesterday Peg and I dragged our old selves up Second Avenue to church. We attended services on Easter Sunday up in Canandaigua, but before that it'd been awhile.

Once one gets in the habit of not going to church, of reading the paper and having that second cup of coffee on Sunday mornings when one would otherwise be getting ready for services, it takes an act of will to make the journey, and I'm always a little hesitant about walking through the door and having all those faces look back at the newbie.

But it was time, for reasons I can't really articulate. So there we were, walking through the doors of St. Marks in the Bowery, the oldest Episcopal Church in New York.

We were a little off-put when we walked through the doors and found no pews, only a ring of chairs around a table in the middle of the sanctuary.

Then there was all that theater lighting up in the rafters. It turns out the place doubles as the venue for a dance company, which is also the reason for the lack of pews.

The congregation ranged from 8 months to over 80 as they shuffled in the door, of every race, gender, sexual orientation and station of life this amazingly diverse city has to offer. A Haitian immigrant living in a homeless shelter. An African-American couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and the 60th anniversary of joining this parish. The daughter of one of my favorite NYU professors, who read at the service and is heading to Harvard for grad school in the fall.

The message from the priest, a young woman who received her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary and followed with finishing school at General Theological Seminary over in Chelsea, began with her story of going to Minneapolis during the recent troubles, and finding little of the drama she'd seen in the news. Along the way she tied the fearful plight of the immigrant families to whom they'd bring diapers and food to the scene in John's Gospel this week, where the disciples meet behind locked doors for fear of arrest. It was one of the best sermons/homilies I'd ever heard, calling me up short a couple of times in the ten minutes or so she spoke.

When we saw a guitar emerge at the Offertory, I cringed a little. But as it turns out, these folks can really sing, and the music ranged from Anglican standards to African-American Gospel. It was simply liminal.

And they'd engaged in what's a pretty common exercise these days, tweaking the liturgy a little to speak to the causes that matter to this congregation. The prayers of the people included the exact number of people killed by gun violence in the U.S. so far this year. Communion was given for "all", rather than "many", and the table was open to anyone who felt called to participate, not just the baptized. The bread, real bread broken into pieces, was passed down the circle, with each of us taking a piece and presenting the plate to the next person.

The service was long by Episcopal standards, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. But it was moving in a way I can't exactly describe. When we first walked through the door and sat down, P and I considered getting up and leaving because it was all just a little too out there for two old high church Anglicans. But by the end, by being open to the experience despite our occasional fidgety discomfort, we discovered something there, experienced the liturgy in the transformational sense in which it's meant to be received.

We'll certainly be back.