Platforms and anthems

The National Cathedral has a new altar platform. It is pretty, though it distresses me a bit that they are spending that kind of money on a "permanent" platform for what's supposed to be a temporary altar set up in the crossing (the area between the congregation and the choir); after all, it's not like they don't have a very nice, functional High Altar up in the sanctuary. Today was the first day they used the new thing.





For those of you who aren't Episcopalian or Catholic, for millennia, the altar (or communion table) was located in the far end of the church up against the wall and the minister faced the altar (same direction as the congregation) while praying over the communion bread and wine. After Vatican II in the 1960s, both Catholics and Anglicans began pulling their altars out from the wall a bit and ministers began standing on the wrong side of the altar facing the congregation during the communion prayers; this is unfortunate because it changed the symbolism of the minister being a chief worshipper co-equal with the congregation to the symbolism of the minister presiding over the service.

A few churches (such as the National Cathedral) took this change a step further by setting up temporary altars during contemporary style services in the crossing to bring the altar "closer to the people," but this is something that started with some of the same aging ministers who used to tell my generation that they were making church "more relevant" to us youth by making us sing really, really bad guitar folk music during worship instead of proper, dignified hymns and chants. LOL, I remember when my friends and I were going to the diocesan camp, we'd often ask if a certain guitar-playing priest was going to be at a session, cause if he was, we didn't want to go and have to put up with his awful music! But I digress....

Ryan and I went to the 11 o'clock Mass this morning at the Cathedral Church of SS. Peter and Paul, also known as the the Washington National Cathedral. He'd been in the cathedral once before for a tour when he was thirteen years old and in town with a school tour group, but he had limited memory of what all he saw and he'd never gotten to attend a service here.

Our bus didn't get us to Mount St. Alban until about quarter til, but the church felt nearly deserted when we walked in, and we were able to walk down the center aisle to find a seat in one of the very front rows in the nave. Even by the time the service started, attendance was surprisingly scant; practically everyone was seated in the front half of the nave, and it was far from being full, even if you'd moved over the handful of people in the back half of the nave and those few in the transcepts.

For the prelude, the organist played Scherzetto Op. 31 by Louis Vierne and Adagio in E by Frank Bridge. The Cathedral Singers, an adult group of fourteen mixed voices, sang an a capella introit from the narthex, "Draw night and take the body of the Lord," by David Hogan, and sounded wonderful. It always impresses me that the choirs here sing without amplification.

Hymns were St. Anne for the procession, St. Agnes for the sequence, Rockingham for a presentation acclamation after the offertory, Carlisle with the odd words "O God of gentle strength" during post-communion (and some idiot in the front rows jumped up to stand and everyone else followed suit), and Michael for the recessional.

The mass setting was odd. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the young priestess in charge of the liturgy for the cathedral (they either need to educate her or replace her), who created a Rite 2 service with non-standard words and quasi-inclusive language and who has been doing weird things this year with the service music, such as this morning where we sang verse four of Laudate Dominum (with inclusive language) in lieu of the Gloria and an awkward recasting of the Sanctus and Benedictus to the tune Land of Rest ("Jerusalem my happy home"). Naturally, with these contemporary liturgists, there is no Kyrie and no Agnus Dei.

A priestess who reminded me of a realtor (especially during communion when she was bossing around an usher to make him move the chalice bearers from their usual spot to a place she preferred) served as celebrant, and she didn't chant any of the service, and made only the bare minimum liturgical gestures during the consecration. Fortunately, one of the concelebrants was male, so I was able to take communion today.

One of the diocesan canons preached way too long—nearly twenty minutes—and basically kept talking about a bunch of poor African villagers bartering for a rat. Somehow that was supposed to tie in with his announced topic of why we should eat communion bread as the Body of Christ.

The highlight of this morning's Mass, as always, was the choir and organ. After their fine introit, the choir did "Draw us in the spirit's tether" by Harold Friedell for the offertory and a starkly modern "Surely thou hast tasted that the Lord is good" by Bernard Rose as a communion motet.

I'm going to try something new tonight: I'm going to try to embed a video in this post. During the offertory, I made an illicit, clandestine recording of the choir with my little point-and-click digital camera so you could hear them sing the Friedell. Keep in mind two things: 1) this isn't really a video for you to "watch" since I didn't want the ushers to see me recording and 2) you're hearing the ambient cathedral sound of an unmiked choir.



Since it's such a hassle taking public transportation to get to and from the cathedral, I don't really get up there as often as I would like. It's probably better for me to stay downtown with the more traditional St. John's Lafayette Square and St. Paul's K Street, though, since I despair of the experimental and liberal liturgies they come up with up here. Of course, cathedrals often have the curse of having to be too many things to too many people, and the National Cathedral has it twice as hard since they have a Congressional mandate to be interdenominational. The problem as I see it, though, is that the new dean is trying to make the National Cathedral too "Protestant" to appeal to one-time visitors from other faith traditions, rather than showing them the glory and tradition of true Anglican worship.

For example, in addition to him letting the young liturgist experiment too much and use inclusive language, he starts the service by standing up front and bringing greetings and making announcements before walking all the way to the back of the church for the processional. He lets the worship be extremely low church, with nothing chanted and with the congregation standing for prayers instead of kneeling, even for the confession and the consecration! He's also done something I hate: he has pulled the choir out of the choir stalls in the chancel and made them sit in chairs arranged behind the crossing altar in the congregationalist style, and that location not only destroys our long-standing Anglican tradition of making the altar rather than the choir the focal point of the church, it does not help the choir acoustically and we lose the magic of that etherial sound drifting out over the nave from the chancel.

I guess one of the things that struck me about the changes in cathedral liturgy and the surprisingly low attendance is when, as Ryan and I were walking around the building taking pictures after the service, I came upon a credence table with a ciborium brimming with consecrated but uneaten communion bread. I guess they were expecting a bigger crowd. The dean's not going to find it, however, from a bunch of curious Methodist tourists.