"Public work" at Ground-Zero
By Donald Schell
For two wonderful days at the beginning of this month, I helped lead a workshop on Music that Makes Community at St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church Wall Street, the colonial church that fronts on Broadway and whose churchyard faces the World Trade Center/Ground Zero site. Sunday after the workshop I sat in the congregation at St. Paul’s for their 10 a.m. liturgy. It was one of the most powerful experiences of our church’s work and worship I have ever had. The murmur of visitors, the impossibility of handling four to five hundred pilgrims an hour with greeters, the pilgrims themselves finding their own way and having their own private reasons for their visit all destroyed any hope that the church could be a place of seclusion, refuge or pious meditation. This was the great work of the church, the public work of liturgy.
When I first visited St. Paul’s in the late 1960’s, it was essentially a museum, George Washington’s Church in New York City. The stunning human losses of 9/11 changed that beyond recognition. When Trinity’s staff saw that St. Paul’s Chapel was undamaged by the fiery collapse of the twin towers next door, they boldly chose to dedicate the historic chapel for the duration of demolition and recovery as a holy place of hospitality to the New York firemen, police, and construction workers at the Ground Zero site. Trinity staff and hundreds of volunteer chaplains from around the country offered rest, comfort, counsel and help for those whose brutal work was combing through hot rubble for genetically identifiable fragments of the dead that grieving family members might bury.
Trinity’s hospitality to a nation’s heroes made St. Paul’s a pilgrimage site. Something like a million and a half visitors a year - imagine an unbroken stream of 400 strangers an hour - wander through to remember, see and reflect on 9/11 displays. As at the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington D.C., some do come to pray, but few kneel or make any outward show. Others seem to be tourists, muted tourists who want to include this bit of history in their trip and tell people at home, ‘I was there.’
For any who remember the pre- 9/11 St. Paul’s and haven’t been there recently, I should add that less than a year ago, Stuart Hoke and the other Trinity staff took another bold step to make the chapel’s welcome more evident – hoping to gather people into a circle of prayer, they removed the long forward-facing pews from the 1960’s to make space for a barrier-free oval of chairs around a central altar. St. Paul’s website has a good slide show picturing the changes and giving its rationale at http://www.saintpaulschapel.org/
Twenty of us, clergy and church music leaders from around the country gathered in this open space round the table for our workshop to talk, and reflect and make music, specifically developing a practice of the most traditional and modern kind of church music – singing we learn by ear and by heart, singing without books. All day our workshop sessions, our worship and even our mid-day meal was at the center of a swirling sea of people, all of America, the world. When we were singing we could feel the music touch them (and sometimes we forgot they were there and lost ourselves in music-making and praise). Sometimes we saw curiosity, joy or even healing on people’s faces. It came in swells, both for us and in their response. Sometimes they walked with their backs to us, continuing their quiet murmur of background conversation as they surveyed the 9/11 displays and the story of workers and a city who turned the terrorist attack into a sign of mutual support and courage. Then a piece of sacred song, something hearty or haunting, maybe some improvised bluesy jazz on a text from the Bible, or even our laughter at a shared discovery, something drew their attention and they were with us in church – both the community of people and the place of worship. So it went all day, hundreds of people an hour and flashes of grace and glory as our little group joined our Public Work to Trinity’s.
In the evening I thought of how strangely intimate and public the days were. Trying to describe our experience on the phone to my wife, I said it felt like street preaching on Times Square, or maybe like participating in a life drawing class with a nude model in the main rotunda of the Metropolitan Museum. We were aiming for truthfulness and Gospel, but we were unequivocally doing intimate, heart work, speaking and singing our faith, in a very public place. The work itself guided us from our fear and self-consciousness.
Even two full days of our workshop didn’t prepare me for the joyful wonder of 10 a.m. liturgy in this place of pilgrimage. I sat in the third or fourth row of the oval seats so I could both join in and watch the congregation and the pilgrims on the perimeter. The busses don’t stop just because it’s Sunday, and as a worshipper and part of a larger, more diffuse group, I felt the strangeness (and joy) of it very strongly. We were a hundred or so people, a solid, diverse congregation, and we were together in faith, in prayer as publicly as if we’d made our circle in Grand Central Station.
Marilyn Haskel, the musician, offered us welcome, guided us through the service leaflet, got us singing with piano and a capella and encouraged us. The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a Jamaican Anglican priest new to Trinity’s staff presided and preached his first liturgy at St. Paul’s. His sermon and the way he engaged us all was breath taking, bold and comforting, confrontive and sweet. And even as he drew our hearts into the center of the circle to hold one another in our reflection on scripture, he might generously, and without the least notice, lob a word or prayers over our heads to the sea of pilgrims.
The liturgy was an even stronger magnet than the music workshop. Strangers slipped into the circle to join us. Many stopped to listen and pray and seemed to wish they could linger longer. A few seemed perplexed to hear a Gospel of such forgiveness, inclusion and challenge. Many blessed themselves with a touch of water from the front.
I wish everyone thinking about inclusion and welcome in our church could spend a Sunday with St. Paul’s, Manhattan. Having experienced it as a blessed and unequivocal Public Work, I don’t think our liturgy will ever look the same to me again.
Public work, as it turns out, may be a better translation of ‘liturgy’ than the ‘public work’ I learned in seminary in the 1960’s. In the 1960’s and 70’s our church was beginning to make our liturgy shared, collaborative work in new ways. ‘The work of the people’ was a useful etymology. It turned our attention to from the priest’s performance to what WE were making together.
Now friends who teach liturgics and history have been telling us that leitourgia (‘liturgy’) in the first century Mediterranean world was ‘public work,’ more like we think of with a DPT, Department of Public Works making or fixing a road or a bridge. In fact in the ancient world public work often referred to the generous works of public-minded rich people, like the medieval queen of Spain who built a bridge at Puente la Reyna for the pilgrims walking to Santiago or like Andrew Carnegie building libraries across America.
Today in 2007, we’ve found enough shared authority in liturgy-making to begin recovering this other, earlier sense of liturgy as work for or on behalf of the people. What we have to offer is holy, vibrant, and flexible enough that it can truly be public work. At St. Paul’s the ‘public work’ made very good sense. For me every question we can frame about welcoming strangers to liturgy will look different to me after three days of singing and praying at St. Paul’s Chapel.
The Rev. Donald Schell is founder St. Gregory's Episcopal Church, San Francisco and consultant and creative director of All Saints Company, San Francisco.
Not to belabour the image, but a bridge built for public access to a pilgrimage site is one built by one Roman Catholic for the use of other Roman Catholics: it only accidentally involves anyone else. Thus it seems we what to avoid thinking of the liturgy as the work of one (priest) for the use of others (laity) - and only accidentally involving anyone else.
I'm curious about the DPT idea of liturgy.
How do we get there from an essentially private act? And by private I mean only "enclosed" (in a home, a church, etc). In what sense is the historic liturgy like building a bridge for public access? I see how this works in that part of Lower Manhattan where there are so many tourists and workers. It is rather different from (eg) St John the Divine where one day in the 1980s, rushing to my locker to change before Sunday Mass, I was stopped by one of the over zealous security folks and told "no tourists beyond this point during services".
But how do we get to the idea of Public Work in a parish (or city) where there are no tourists? What public work can the parish perform in Smallville?
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October 22, 2007 8:43 PM
Huw,
Thanks for your excellent questions -
"...how do we get to the idea of Public Work in a parish (or city) where there are no tourists? What public work can the parish perform in Smallville?"
They universalize the experience I wrote about in exactly the way the experience seemed to invite, and I don't have answers but a couple more ideas -
1. when a congregation has no visitors, maybe our practice should be to pray regularly that God send us some. People are often reluctant to pray for specifics, and those who are willing to pray for strangers in the door may be hoping for new members ready to accept a pledge card - but strangers and visitors are a holy trust, they come seeking whatever they seek (like the pilgrim/tourist/visitors at St. Paul's Chapel) and God offers us something and asks something of us too in welcoming them in the particularity of the hopes and desires that brought them in the door.
and
2. work for more outdoor processions (like Palm Sunday), and for liturgies at parish picnics in public parks, and maybe even street preaching (!).
Part of what the 'public work' experience showed us at St. Paul's was how much we have privatized Christian discourse. We speak it to one another and largely behind closed doors where we can welcome visitors if we have them on our own terms. We find that comfortable because it allows us the settled complacency of 'knowing what we mean.'
Speaking faith in public, especially with half-hearted listeners who are there for some unexpected reason or at least a reason we don't know or know we'll probably mis-interpret makes us hear everything we say differently. Every statement provokes questions in our own minds, and by those questions speaking our faith becomes a way of discovering more about it and how it works.
I recall two quite distinct 'public work' settings for liturgy, a recent testing of my old response to one, and simply my experience of another.
When I was in seminary in the late 1960's, Bishop Paul Moore, Rowland Cox (chaplain at General) and others gathered as many as would go with them for protest masses in the Pentagon. The free speech in this is part of what I'm thinking about. We've become so used to keeping faith out of the public square that a mass in the Pentagon sounds a little like the Army-invited evangelistic efforts that have had Pentagon offices, but this was the opposite. Exercising a choice for public witness, they knew they might be arrested. The mass was public but the congregation's presence was not officially sanctioned or invited. I chose not to go. At the time I thought these people I loved and admired were nonetheless distorting the liturgy when they offered it in protest. It wasn't protest that didn't make sense to me - I took part in several other protests - but offering eucharist in protest didn't make sense to me at that time.
Now recently, just some months ago, with many clergy and laity from the Diocese of California, I joined our bishop for a mass for peace on the plaza of San Francisco's Federal Building. Looking back, I can say that liturgy (in a specifically designated free speech area) still felt public in a different way than being at St. Paul's. I think it was because I felt we were in a double bind in our intentions toward bystanders. Did we want to welcome them into our worshiping community? Not necessarily. Our intention was significantly more complicated - I think we meant to offer support and encouragement to some and prophetic confrontation to others. If you ask me whether that's always true in the liturgy, I'd concede that it is. But I don't think we can afford to be quite so clear who should receive what message. If we sort out those who need encouragement and those WE are confronting, we may close out some of the Holy Spirit's wildness and unpredictability.
Part of our experience at St. Paul's Chapel was that we couldn't afford or sustain an interpretative frame, couldn't decide how sheeps vs goats would hear us or determine whether we were sowing oats or tares. Every moment had a quality of divine uncertainty and lots of 'whoever has ears let them hear.' And all we knew for certain was we couldn't know WHAT the strangers were hearing or especcially what it would mean to them.
The other experience your question brings to mind was a kind of public prayer that is certainly available in many Smallvilles. For some years here I assisted each Saturday a priest friend who was chaplain at San Francisco County Jail. During the week he was in counseling, getting prisoners books, helping them communicate with family outside and Saturday's we in offering a weekly liturgy went in for liturgy and lunch with the prisoners.
The sheriff's department assigned us a big open rec area with some fixed tables and chairs. We had a colorful hanging we fixed to the window bars to bring a bit of life to a very hard, cold space, and we covered one of the tables with a cloth and sat our earthenware chalice and pattern on it to mark the beginning of the liturgy.
But our area was only separated from the TV watching area by a floor-to-ceiling wall of bars, and Saturday mornings when the space was available to us, Soul Train was on the TV. Those who wanted to watch that music show liked it loud. Our singing, reading, and conversation sermon simply couldn't reach the sound level of the TV and if it could have gotten comparably loud, the TV would have been turned louder in response.
How is the jail public and like St. Paul's? It's worship space and a broader gathering that's beyond our control and that makes us notice what we're offering that may communicate outside the bounds of our circle and how it does.
In the bigger gathering beyond 'our assembly' we suffered complete week by week defeat in our public speaking and singing. Our guys leaned in to hear. We huddled close to sing. But the TV watchers did notice what we were doing. They'd glance up and pause to observe gestures, movement, and they might look for a while at visual symbols.
Nonverbal evangelism sometimes brought prisoners from the TV watchers to the liturgy the following week (boundaries looked porous, but prisoners don't float from one thing to another; deputies want program and activity choices declared at the right time and then want or need to leave them in place. So anyone's choice to join the liturgy would only be evident the next week.
What could the TV-watchers see when the looked up that made that liturgy public work?
- the visual care we'd put into the gathering space,
- the way we gathered and greeted one another
- that inmates got a chance to speak and read,
- respectful listening in the body language of inmates and volunteers listening to one another,
- genuine affection at the passing of the peace
- sharing food and drink in a setting where guarding what's your own is the norm
- a chalice and patten, a cup of real wine (contraband except for sacramental use) and a plate of good bread - visuals that spoke of feasting, communion (in the broadest sense), and again offering something to one another.
Your 1980's story of the cathedral verger saying 'no tourists beyond this point during services' is still revelatory. We know what we're doing and can sustain that knowing best if we control who is with us as we do it. How do we welcome tourists (whatever that means in our Smallvilles) and let them be who they are and in conversation with the Good News we're trying to speak and live?
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October 23, 2007 2:32 PM