At the Cathedral I had the
pleasure of attending a class with Madeleine L’Engle a favorite author from my
childhood who wrote A Wrinkle in Time and the The Wind at the Door
among other highly mystical novels for children. The fact that she was an
Episcopalian only confirmed my love for her.
L’Engle - with her tongue
firmly in her cheek - lovingly referred to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
as the ‘Severed Wasp.’ The Cathedral is famously unfinished, with a
gap in construction in the area of the transepts where the great central tower
should rise over the crossing. Founded in last years of the 19th century
the Cathedral was intended to be a celebration of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
(WASP) cultural dominance in the United States. Hence the ironic double
meaning of ‘Severed Wasp.’
Built on the highest
outcropping of stone on the Island of Manhattan, this grandiose seat for the
Bishop of New York was a direct response to the completion of St. Patrick’s
Roman Catholic Cathedral on 5th Avenue. The charter of the Cathedral clearly
envisions the structure as an assertion of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
hegemony in the face of surging immigration. The cathedral was even to
have its own militia to protect the right order of things.
Then the ruling classes went
bankrupt in the stock market crash of 1929.
The work on the Cathedral stopped, just as hundreds of ambitious Episcopal
building projects stopped. Some stopped in mid-span like St. Luke’s in
Evanston, Illinois and others never got started like a proposed Cathedral in
Chicago, and a gigantic Cathedral in Baltimore (the current very large church
was to be the chapel). Our own aborted Cathedral in Andorra is another
example of a grandiose project on a towering high point cut down first by
market forces and then by fading interest.
You see, we lost. We lost
the battle for dominance in our society and had to learn to share with
immigrants and people of many races, classes, ethnicities etc. Some folks
are still fighting and some are still pretending that by dint of our heritage,
family trees and taste we are still a special breed apart and above the
rest.
The fact is, we lost, and that
is the best thing that ever happened to the Episcopal Church, in my
opinion.
We mistook a warped amalgam of
class, ethnicity, and white supremacy and made it an animating principal of
gross and grandiose assertion of privilege. These temples were raised to
the wrong glory. Losing is humbling and humility is the right position to
give God glory in fellowship with all our neighbors, as equals in God's sight.
Jesus said, “We must lose our
life to find our true life.” As a church, I believe we are in a very
exciting time. Dying has brought tremendous opportunity for discovering
new life set free from old identifications and dead ends. Dying teaches
us to keep Christ at the center and to resist all substitutes. Christ is
the glory of God we seek and the Gospel of John always reminds us that this
Glory is Cross-Shaped in our hearts, in our communities, but maybe not in the
stone of grandiose buildings.
The good news is that enlightened leadership made St. John
the Divine a center of job creation and job training for the people of Harlem
during the 1970s, wrapping up this story on the happy note of redemption. One never knows where the new life of Christ may arise, old stones, old stumps,
old churches too.
- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
