Sunday on Lafayette Square

This morning I got up early to go to church at St. John's Episcopal in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, where I met up with the handsome and erudite Robert, with whom I've been chatting on line for a year starting back when he was at the university in Fayetteville and I was in Tulsa before either of us moved to D.C. Below, you can see him standing in the "President's Pew" in the church.

It was, alas, a second-string Sunday, as the rector was out of town and we were stuck with two priestesses. The priestess who was the celebrant always reminds me of a consumption patient, and when she would bless the congregation, she did it with such a limp arm I feared she would not have the strength to finish the sign of the cross. Another priestess preached. The message was ok, but she needs to come to one of my speech classes to work on her enunciation and elocution.

The music was a little odd. The offertory anthem was "King Jesus hath a garden," a Dutch folk song arranged by the contemporary Brit Stephen Cleobury. It was an interesting piece, but the director was going for too light of a sound, it seemed at though his tenors were having to sing in their falsettos, and noone quite got to the pizzazz or oomph of the anthem to let it go anywhere. The communion motet was "Jesu, the very thought of thee," by the Victorian composer Edward Bairstow. Hymns were Westminster Abbey; In Babilone; Jesus, meine Zuversicht; and Deus tuorum militum. After the communion motet, they tried to get the congregation to sing some of that dreadful Taizé music, the chant In God alone, but I only heard one woman in the congregation attempting it, and it was painful hearing her dissonant birdlike voice chirping alone. I wish they would give up on the Taizé crap. The psalm antiphon was a setting using the melody from Picardy, but I don't know whose Anglican chant the choir used for the verses. St. John's is rather low church, so most of the Ordinary wasn't sung, and the priestess didn't chant a thing. They did a weak Robert Powell setting of the Sanctus, and for the Gloria, they did this hideous little antiphon with choral verses by Carl Haywood from his Mass for Grace which sounded like a Blues-y, syncopated, lounge act. Somes they try too hard at this church to be ecumenical.