The bell tower

Many people who have walked around the Dupont Circle have gone by a traditional gothic-looking church flying a big rainbow banner down the front of their facility. A lot of people have never been in the building, but they kind of think of it as the "gay church" in Dupont. Well, it isn't a "gay church." It's the Church of the Pilgrims, one of the "More Light" Presbyterian churches that, while still in the Presbyterian mainstream, is open and welcoming to all in the GLBT community.

Yesterday happened to be the day of their annual fall festival and art market. After our brunch and agricultural experiences, Robert and I Metroed over to Dupont for a look-see at the art, and most especially we were going so we could make the rare climb (they only do this once a year) to go up in their bell tower for spectacular views of Rock Creek Park and the fall foliage.

The tower was an adventure in and of itself.

Viewers first had to make their way inside the church and then up to their rear balcony and choir loft. Once there, while we waited to go up, we got to look around a bit. It's a pretty church on the inside with traditional gothic-themed architecture and some particularly beautiful stained glass windows. The organ console and many of the organ pipes were in the balcony, but they had the console closed up, so I couldn't examine the organ specifications.

Once the traffic cleared and we were allowed up, we began to climb this tight, small, cast iron, spiral staircase in an opening passage just wide enough to accommodate the staircase. The stairs were so narrow, I had to climb up sideways, and it seemed like a joint project for both feet and hands. Finally, we got to the top of the stairs and walked out onto the floor in the small tower.....only to find out that we had to climb up two more staircases! So, up we went again, up another narrow spiral staircase. On the next landing, I could see that Robert, who is both acrophobic and claustrophobic, was less than excited about this process, but we could see the light at the top of the tower shining down from the top of the final staircase, and we pressed onward. At last we made it up! The top of the tower was an open-air room with a double-height ceiling that allowed for tall, pointed arch window openings. And the view was lovely.



Here's Robert, all the way on top of the bell tower!

Seasonal user pic

Announcing my new Hallowe'en season user pic!

I've long sought something "appropriate" for the witching season, and finally found this picture to use as my user pic. It's a drawing depicting a jack-o'-lantern made from a big, purple turnip, with a few black bats flying in the background.

Turnip, you ask?

Carved vegetable lanterns during harvest season arise out of an old Irish legend. A man named Jack tricked the Devil and made a deal with him never to admit Jack into Hell. After Jack died, he didn't go to Heaven and since he'd made the agreement with the Devil not to be admitted there, he was forced to wander the Earth in quest of a final resting place. Jack carved one of his turnips and put a candle inside it so he would have a lantern on his journeys.

The first reference to "Jack-o'-Lantern" appeared in 1663, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Turnip jack-o'-lanterns are still popular in Ireland and Scotland today. Many vegetables are used including potatoes and rutabagas. When the tradition came to North America, the variety of squash we call pumpkins became a natural vegetable for these lanterns and the species has been bred over the years for large, hollow pumpkins.

Jack-o'-lanterns weren't originally a Hallowe'en thing, though. They were a general symbol of the harvest and of autumn. The vegetable lantern didn't get its Hallowe'en association until after the Civil War, and some sources date that as late as the early 20th century.

One of the advantages of turnip lanterns over pumpkin lanterns is portability. If one pulls the turnip up from the ground and keeps the green leaves intact, the turnip jack-o'-lanterns can easily be carried about by holding on to the leaves.

So, in honor of old tradition, this year's Hallowe'en user pic is the turnip jack-o'-lantern!

Mozart and bagpipes

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I decided to walk to church, where I was meeting my friend Max, who'd invited me weeks before to come to this service because they were having a small orchestra to play a Mozart Mass setting. As I began to approach Lafayette Square (the park just immediately north of the White House), I heard the distinctive wails of a bagpipe band. As I got closer, there was a big crowd in the center east part of the square watching a band of pipers and drummers from the French Army. Not sure what the occasion was.

Anyway, as you can probably surmise, I was going to church at St. John's Lafayette Square, the "Church of the Presidents." It's an old, 1815-vintage cracker box-style church that's still fairly intact with original (uncomfortable) furnishings and design. The rather simple stained glass windows inside were designed by the artisans at Chartres Cathedral in France. This is the church where President Bush goes on those rare occasions he goes to church in D.C. They have valet parking here, but I've no idea where they take the cars. Max met me on the plaza outside the west doors before the service and began introducing me to folks....I do believe that he knows everybody....but he has been a member there for years.

It seems as though the parish has a Mozart service with special music and orchestra every fall. There was no particular holy day that Sunday, so it's just a tradition they have. This year, the Mass setting was the Missa brevis in F, K. 192, from 1774 when Mozart was but 18, and they used selections from Vesperae solennes de confessore, K. 339, for anthems. An orchestra of ten with organ continuo played the service. St. John's has a tiny choir with just a dozen singers, but they sound good in the space. In the east end of the church, the space narrows for the rather small and crowded sanctuary, with the northern corner filled with the organ pipe chamber and the southern corner for the organ and, on this Sunday, the orchestra. The choir sat in front of the organ pipes.

The service began with the Kyrie movement sung as a choral prelude. They would later sing the Gloria and the Sanctus/Benedictus in their proper places in the liturgy; the Agnus Dei was sung during communion, rather than prior as part of the liturgy. I noticed the conspicuous absence of the Credo, and they didn't even recite a creed during the service, even though the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer direct that the Nicene Creed is to be said or sung on all Sundays. Hymns for the service were Creation for the processional, a very slow King's Weston as the sequence, two verses of Forest Green as a presentation hymn following the offertory, and Austria for the recessional. An Anglican chant by the parish's organist/choirmaster got sung for the Psalm; I wasn't sure if the congregation was supposed to sing along or not, so I sang it quietly. From the Solemn Vespers, Dixit Dominus was the offertory anthem and Laudate Dominum was the communion anthem. I thought the soprano soloist for the Laudate, Claire Kuttler, was particularly good. The postlude was Church Sonata in B-flat, K.212.

One of their priestesses was the principal celebrant, but the rector and an assisting priest were there as concelebrants, so I was able to take communion. The liturgy was a kind of weird, quasi-inclusive language version of Rite 2. The priestess didn't chant anything. She also didn't do the elevations and genuflections during the consecration, but I gather she's rather low church. She didn't wear a chasuble during the consecration and was vested only in alb and stole. There was a bit of a comical moment when she started to continue with the prayer of consecration after the Sanctus but before the Benedictus. Because of all the extra musicians, they couldn't use the altar rail, so they had to do the distribution of communion Catholic-style. Their communion wine was really sweet; I suspect they used Mogen David or something similarly hideous.

The rector, Father León, preached. He's always a good speaker. The gospel reading for the day was that troublesome "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle" passage from St. Mark, so he had to preach on that topic, noting the irony of being told to sell everything and give the money to the poor when he was standing in a rich parish in the middle of a capital campaign. He explained how nine out of ten couples who came to him for counseling about marital problems had money issues at the root. He also made one analogy I thought was interesting: in this gospel passage, he says the opposite of rich is not poor, the opposite of rich is free.

After the service and the postlude, there was a lunch in the parish hall, but Max and I didn't stay, as we were headed out to brunch. More on that in another post.


Choir and clergy during the Sanctus.

It's Friday the 13th!

Have you ever wondered why Friday the 13th is considered to be an unlucky day?

It all dates back to medieval times in the early 14th century. This was a time of constant power feuds between kings and even the Catholic popes. The period of the Crusades had ended only a century before. European inhabitants had discovered the benefit of trade with Asia, particularly from the Middle East and the Orient, and demanded spices and goods. Traders and businessmen made regular trade journeys into the Middle East. Christianity, the dominant religion in Europe, encouraged believers to take pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The Middle East, though, was a very dangerous place full of robbers and other threats. Into that environment arose the Poor Knights of Christ, later becoming the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also popularly known as the Knights Templar.

The Templars formed in the early 12th century with the purpose of defending the ruins of King Solomon's Temple and the City of Jerusalem, with that task extending somewhat into protecting pilgrims and others coming to Jerusalem. The Templars were the people who developed what was to become our modern banking system, as they arranged to take deposits and serve as a sort of medieval ATM as the wealthy traveled across Europe and the Near East. They became a very large, wealthy, and powerful order.

Early in the 14th century, the French king Philip IV needed cash to continue his war with England, found himself broke, and found himself heavily in debt to the Templars. With the help of Pope Clement V, a man Philip had personally politicked into the Vatican, Philip arranged for all Templars all across Europe to be simultaneously arrested though a secret plan with Vatican imprimatur so the Templars could be charged with trumped up charges, tortured, and forced into signing false confessions. Many of the Templars were burned at the stake for alleged heresies.

What the king and pope didn't count on, though, was that the Templars were very popular with the common people. They were saddened when they saw what was being done to their beloved Templars, and it was the common people who began the tradition of an unlucky day, the day when the Templars were all arrested, Friday, October 13, 1407.

Midnight musings

Why does society condemn suicide?

All the major world religions are very against suicide and consider it to be a grave offense against the deity(s). In many countries/states/jurisdictions, committing (or more accurately, attempting) suicide is illegal, although I suspect that's largely a codification of religious prohibitions. Psychiatrists will hospitalize/imprison a patient who is actively suicidal. And, even amongst those who profess not to be religious, whether they are agnostic or atheist or whatever, suicide is thought to be wrong and is something they try to prevent.

But why? What is wrong with someone who is tired of living arranging for his or her death? If you take away all religious arguments, what is the purpose of mandatory life suffering?

Tonight's church

They've added instrumentals to the Sunday evening Mass at St. Stephen's. Tonight a violinist and a flutist played accompaniments for the hymns and Mass setting. It was an interesting touch, though on those rare occasions the congregation actually sang they drowned out the instrumental sound.

Hymns tonight were Leoni for the processional, Slane for the offertory, and Nettleton for the recessional. The communion song printed in the bulletin wasn't used and they did "You satisfy the hungry heart" instead (not that it mattered, since the congregation never sings the communion song). The Mass setting was a hodge-podge with How's Parish Communion Service for the Gloria, Proulx's A Community Mass for the Sanctus and Benedictus, Mass for the Parishes by Leo Nestor (2001) for the consecration, and Isele's Holy Cross Mass for the Agnus Dei. Nestor, incidentally, is the director of the sacred music graduate program at the Catholic University of America here in D.C.

Msgr. Filardi was celebrant and homilist. He spoke about Hell—the real "Gehenna" that was the trash dump outside the city walls of Jerusalem and how that land was originally used by the Canaanites to worship the Mesopotamian god Marduk by sacrificing human babies. Interestingly, Marduk was often depicted as a horned monster, which became the basis for our modern concept of the devil.

I was surprised to hear one of the petitions in the Prayers of the People being in support of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, which starts tonight, and general good wishes and blessings for the Jewish people.

Once again I got put to work. This time I had to count people in the pews on the left half of the church. I really must stop going to the evening service.

Holiday

To all my Jewish friends and readers, best wishes for a holy Yom Kippur.