When someone has a year-round church job, there is great temptation to skip church while on vacation. (Temptation, I might add, to which I seldom succumb.) But when going to church means worshipping at the National Cathedral, sleeping in seems pretty pointless!
The place is not only enormous (the sixth largest cathedral in the world) but also gorgeous- the kind of place that transports you to another sphere from the moment you enter it. We were especially fortunate that as we walked through the front doors, a guest choir from Texas was singing for the prelude – and those incredible acoustics made those fifty Texans sound like the Robert Shaw Chorale times three, the sound rolling down from the back balcony like a mighty, magnificent flood of music. (One of the pieces was Kurt Bestor’s “Prayer for the Children,” which the Carthage Choir sang under my direction.) Once the service began, the cathedral’s own choir took over and sang sublimely in several different anthems. The service was a fairly basic Service of Eucharist in the Episcopalian tradition – done quite formally and yet with a nice touch of warmth which made even three casually clad tourists from Wisconsin feel very welcome. And it was amazing how much we could feel at home in a space we’ve only known from the televised funerals of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
After church we took a guided tour, assuredly led by Sophia – pictured above – who has been leading tours in the Cathedral for the last twenty years or so. I’m pretty sure she was from Texas originally and she led the tour with a delicious mix of serious formality and sneaky sense of humor, her precise explanations warmed with her southern drawl. She had an unerring sense for what would be interesting to normal folks on such a tour – and yet her talk included more than the astonishing statistics about how many tons the heaviest bells in the carillon weigh (22 tons), the number of pipes in the organ (over 10,000) and the like. It also conveyed the warmth and reverence she clearly feels for the place- the People’s Church, as she referred to it repeatedly.
Kathy and I have been in some splendid cathedrals around the world- San Marco in Venice, St. Peter’s in Vienna, St. Vitus in Prague, St. Patrick’s in NYC. . . but I’m quite sure that none of them made us smile like this one – thanks in large part to the church lady who showed us around the place!