years, the whole long (and I mean loooong) nave was open, and filled with people (3000 perhaps). And the organ, whose every pipe had to be shipped off to its maker somewhere in the Midwest to have soot removed, was playing again too. Had it not been a nasty cold rainy day, the light of the cleaned stained glass windows would have sparkled throughout.Sitting midway down the nave, I decided that the place is just too big - nearly as long as a long New York city block. The figures in the sanctuary looking like performers in a flea circus! It is certainly an accoustic disaster. The festivities began with music performed by a brass band, somewhere way up front. From where I was sitting, the melody was indiscernible; it sounded more like the tooting and jeering of horns in a distant traffic jam. Later some drummers let loose in the back; it sounded like being in the subway as an express train thunders past.
And yet one thing does work in that space - not the choir, not the organ, certainly not hymn singing, which is like trying to synchronize people in two different time zones. The one thing that works is, literally, one thing: a single instrument or voice. (I'm tempted to say a still small voice.) I've heard it before at an interfaith service after the Asian tsunami, when a shakuhachi's breathy melody seemed to fill the whole space, hovering and lingering. Today it
was a solitary saxophone (Paul Winter), and its sound flowed through the space without collision or blurring. It's more like the way a single voice echoes in a vast canyon.The ceremony was full of pomp with a huge cast, but what captured the weird sublimity of the space best for me was something I initially thought appalling - a windsock-like Chinese silk fish on a pole, which flashed back and forth above the end of the opening procession like the flag corps of a marching band. And yet, as the procession made its way deeper and deeper in, the fish - yellow and gold - was revealed to be darting and swimming in loops, exploring this newly rediscovered space and finding it could move around freely in it. A loosed spirit, cavorting in this space like an eel in the silent depths of a deep lake.
St. John the Divine is all about reimagining what a cathedral can be in the modern age. (In his giddy sermon the goofball Dean mentioned two cathedrals we'd recently lost, Yankee Stadium and Studs Terkel.) Maybe one thing a cathedral can be in this busy city is this - a site for the the rediscovery of the single voice, in a place where architecture fades into sublime natural landscape, where (to borrow words from Schleiermacher channeling Spinoza) "freedom has become nature again."
