Dear Friends,
Sr. Promise’s Silver Jubilee mass was a beautiful celebration and it was wonderful to see so many people supporting her, including two Sisters of the Love of God, who travelled all the way from their convent at Fairacres, Oxford. When I was at Seminary, in Oxford, one of the first things we had to do was visit the convent to listen to a talk by the late Mother Mary Clare on prayer. Each new seminarian then had interviews with not one but two professed sisters about our rule of life. I met with Sr. Mary Magdalene of the Resurrection and Sr. Elfreda of the Cross. Like Carmelites, the Sisters of the Love of God take a dedication in addition to their professed name and they explained to me that the dedication was very important; “We find that you live out your dedication during your life as a member of the community” I was told. The Sisters of the Love of God are an enclosed community, which means that they are dedicated to a life of prayer, with an emphasis on reconciliation. There is a beautiful sentence in their rule, which linked the love of God with the urgency of reconciliation – something our world is in so much need of:
There is in true contemplation an urgency to love God for himself and also a desire that all humankind should be drawn to respond to his mercy.
You can find out more about their work on their website.
That same kind of urgency was re-iterated at the annual Path to Peace Foundation gala that Alison and I attended a few days ago. Organized by Archbishop Caccia, this annual event honors those who go the extra mile to foster peace. This year, the King and Queen of Jordan were jointly honored. King Abdullah spoke movingly about his responsibility to protect both Moslem and Christian holy places, and the importance of the place of Palestinian Christians and Coptic Christians in the Middle East. He spoke passionately against extremism, and the need for us to all take a part in promoting peace. It was humbling to hear how, in a country that is not blessed with huge resources, Jordan has welcomed refugees from around the world and given them a home. In his speech, the King spoke of mutual respect and cooperation, and how people of all faiths can make a difference. He said,
Drawing on our faith in God, our common humanity, and our will to jointly defeat poverty and despair, end occupation and injustice, help refugees everywhere to return home, readiness to rebuild shattered communities, and renew the hope that young people everywhere so desperately need.
On May 22, we welcome the Bishop of New York who will celebrate confirmation and also receive new members into our church family. Please make every effort to be with us that day to greet our Bishop and celebrate the commitment of members of our Church and Choir School. There will be a special coffee hour in the Narthex following the 11am service with plenty of celebration cake! It is the day of the Israeli Parade which, this year, starts in 57th Street so 5th Avenue will be closed. However, it will be easy to get to church and we will also have extra security guards outside the Church and across the road to assist parishioners. It has been a delight to have so many joining us in-person and on-line this year.
Also on May 22, we will hold a very special evensong to honor all who work in the funeral industry. During the pandemic, we have prayed for, and honored all our first responders, our doctors, nurses, and all engaged in the medical profession, and rightly so. But our funeral homes have also had to deal with the enormity of this pandemic and the incredible loss of life and outpouring of grief. Our funeral home workers are among the un-sung heroes of the pandemic and we will honor them and pray for them and their families at 4pm. Why not make a day of celebration on May 22? After coffee hour, have some brunch near the church and come back for evensong.
Finally, Dr. Filsell shared with me a speech that the British actor and comedian, Alexander Armstrong, gave at a concert at St. Paul’s Cathedral organized by the Friends of Cathedral Music. I was so moved by it, that I print it in full here. That gives me the opportunity to say that, if you know of a boy who enjoys singing, we currently have spaces in the choir school for this next academic year, particularly in Grade 5. Remember that most of the cost of the choristership is covered by the Church – it is an incredible opportunity of a lifetime. Please tell your friends about the Choir School.
Affectionately,
Carl
Your priest and pastor
“The Privilege of Choristership” by Alexander Armstrong
Your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen: good evening! What a spectacular event this is and what a great honour it is to be a part of it. I am thrilled to be here. Moreover, I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you briefly about the tremendous privilege of choristership: the single greatest leg-up a child can be given in life.
Now, I know that sounds overblown and, yes, it is a bold claim but the more I think about it the truer I realise it is. Someone made the mistake of asking me during an interview the other day what the benefits are of being a chorister. Well that interview ended up overrunning by half of an hour and I was barely halfway through my list.
The most obvious benefit is the total submersion in music. This is a ‘compleat’ musical education by process of osmosis. When you come to hang up your cassock for the final time at the age of 13 you will – without even having realised it was happening because you were just having a lovely time singing – have personal experience of every age and fashion of music from the ancient fauxbourdons of plainchant, to the exciting knotty textures of anthems so contemporary that the composers themselves might very well have conducted you. You will have breathed life into everyone from Buxtehude to Britten to Bach to Bridge to Bax to Brahms to Byrd to Bairstow to Bruckner to Bliss (and that’s just the Bs I can think of off the top of my head). But you will know them, know them and love them in the way only a performer truly can. Choral music, to this day, has the power to move me so profoundly that I can lose myself in it for hours and just ride out the happy contemplations it evokes. It is a constant and lifelong tiding of comfort and – euphoric – joy.
Then there is the musicianship you absorb as a chorister, not just the music theory, the maths (the Italian!) all of which is very useful, but elegant musical phrasing, the projection of good diction, the shaping of beautiful vowel sounds for optimum tone, the careful precision singing a psalm, which can only be achieved by listening intently to those around you and blending your tone and rhythm with theirs – all of these skills and sensitivities become second nature and all of them have strange and unexpected use and resonance in later life.
And then there’s the language – and I don’t mean the salty badinage of the vestry but the liturgy you’re immersed in, the psalms, the collects, the canticles – the poetry you get to sing (Herbert, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Hardy, Auden are all poets I first learnt to love – Christopher Smart even – by singing and performing their words). Your lexicon at the age of 13 is astounding, and your turn of phrase, taught by endless psalms and hymns, and not just the range of your vocabulary but your innate sense of the poetic. You will have come to know only too well the powerful quiet of an evensong, the sumptuous echo of a final amen sung from an ante-chapel but rolling around the clerestory like wine in a taster’s glass.
And let’s not overlook the discipline of choristership; the order it brings to a young person’s often chaotic life, the friendship, the focus. Punctuality is one of the first lessons you learn: the ignominy of arriving even a minute late is something no chorister wants to experience twice. Then self-possession, decorum and grace are all attributes you quickly learn to fake – in the first instance – before adopting them for real as you gradually mature. But where else in the modern world is a child taught gravitas? Where else is a child taught, for example, to bow with proper dignity and humility?
I owe my entire career to my experience as a chorister. It was where I learnt to perform, where I learnt to use the full range of my voice; where I learnt to listen, where I learnt to write comedy, where I learnt to carry a pencil at all times – but most importantly it was where I learnt the wonderful truth that something exceptional, something as beautiful as anything anywhere, can be created just by you and your friends. I remember on a choir tour to Salamanca (ooh travel there’s another benefit!) exploring the old cathedral with a couple of friends and finding ourselves alone in some sort of chapter house, we fired off a Boyce 3-part canon just to test the acoustics. A terrible, toe-curlingly self-indulgent thing to do but what a sound we made! And what a thing to discover: that we three – children essentially – carried between us all the components of something so joyous, so perfect, so complete. (And Boyce! There we are, there’s another B for my list.)
I was lucky enough to be a chorister at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh which had a good mix of boy and girl choristers as is now fairly typical in cathedrals up and down the country. And both there and at Trinity College, Cambridge where I ended up as a choral scholar, I sang with people from all walks of life (many of whom had their entire educations – at some of the country’s best schools I might add – paid for by the music they had first learnt as choristers). I sang alongside some people of different faiths and plenty of none at all. And I am always heartened by the ethnic diversity in our cathedral and college choir rooms. So you see, you don’t need to be a boy to be a chorister, you don’t need to be a toff to be a chorister, you don’t need to be religious, you don’t even need to be Christian. Although as I say that I’m aware there is a certain spirituality that all choristers come to know well – something that lurks in the silences of a darkening nave while rush-hour traffic chugs about just yards outside the West door. A spirituality that is wrapped up in the ritual, the mystery and the beauty of this ancient tradition we have become part of. And I’m going to call that spirituality The Privilege of Choristership. That is what we are here tonight to celebrate and to preserve for the future, ‘throughout all generations’.
