The Mesh

continued

Though it was a long time before I could kneel without self-consciousness, other acted-out elements of the service spoke to something totally unsuspected in me. The cross carried in procession, the candles, the priestly robes, the genuflecting - the ceremony of it all!

In the lucid and rational services of the Unitarian Church, with their appeal to the best in humankind, something, for me, had been missing. The numinous. The irrational. The acknowledgment of the worst in us. It was as though, within a life centered on the effort to understand, there was another self. Passionate, illogical - the kind of person I thought I didn't like.

I remember an evening service at St. Marks eighteen years after we stepped so tentatively through its doors, when someone put into words what I'd sensed, that first day. I'd been wanting my music-loving friend Sandra Aldrich to hear St. Mark's glorious organ, but her own Baptist church met at the same Sunday morning hour. This unusual evening Eucharist, a memorial service for our late assistant rector, Father Brinckerhoff, was my chance to invite her.

Two minutes into the service I knew it was a mistake. Father Brinckerhoff, it seemed, had been an Anglo-Catholic, perpetually frustrated by St. Mark's low-church style. To honor him that evening, St. Mark's had decided on an unprecedented High-Church mass. There was chanting in Latin, swinging of censers, ringing of bells, sprinkling with holy water.

Through clouds of incense I stole increasingly anxious glances at my Baptist friend, sitting very erect through all the kneeling and bowing. It was unlike any service at St. Mark's before or since, though I doubted I could explain this to Sandra.

"Well," I ventured, when choir and clergy had processed a final time about the church and the acolytes had snuffed out the last candle, "I don't know what all of that said to you."

"What it said?" Sandra echoed. She turned to me eyes bright with tears. "It said, 'the holiness of God.'''

Holiness.

That was what I'd felt, that rainy September Sunday in 1959, though I'd lacked the word for it.

Long before that service for Father Brinckerhoff, John and I had discovered in "unfriendly" St. Marks the loving community that's been our extended family ever since. We'd met there people of every economic level. A few rich - the ones whose cars in the parking lot had caught our eyes. A few poor. Most in between. For us St. Mark's came to be not a church building but a place where the church - the people of God - gathers to worship.

Did St. Mark's change? Or did we? Did God simply shield us, until we were ready for it, from the warmth that was always there?

Whatever the explanation, in 1959 we were not ready. As we adhered to our program of attending the gray stone church till Thanksgiving, we needed to be left alone and we were. For ten weeks, in a small act of God's grace on our behalf, we attended the 11 :00 service each Sunday without anyone approaching us.

We stuck to our own no-talking-about-it rule too. The power of silence, the God-beyond-words I had glimpsed through Reinhold Niebuhr, was doing its mysterious work. Thanksgiving came and went and, still without discussing it, we continued going. We never did have that end-of-experiment talk. We simply found ourselves, Sunday mornings, getting Liz into a dress, the boys into jackets and ties, and heading for St. Mark's.

We were a very long way from personal commitment or an encounter with Christ or any such thing. Those were to come for each of us in different ways. But since that September day in 1959, except when traveling, we have not missed a single Sunday at the stone church beyond the Indian.