Indigestion - Part One
Food for the Soul
On the evening of the 24th we visited Grace Cathedral, not for the midnight mass which would have required more stamina than either of us could muster, but rather for the 5pm “Festival of Lessons and Carols.”
Okay. It’s a cathedral, so what might one expect? There was a Bishop, William Swing, and he was accompanied everywhere by a couple of guys carrying phallic sceptors or something. And there was a “dean,” Alan Jones, who also happens to be the “Canon (honoris causa)” of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres. We heard lessons read by Albert Lander (the Verger) and by Martin Uden, (HM Consul General) — no separation of church and state for the Brits it seems… and of course Grace Cathedral is a royalist beachhead in San Francisco. …heavy sigh… I think I would have preferred the Interregnum, but alas the Stuart King, Charles the second was restored to the throne and it’s been downhill ever since, really.
But I expected the pomp of the high church. The robes, the vestments, the towering stone and concrete interiors, the stations of the cross and all the other proto-papist nonsense - the pictures of Christ as a baby in his mom’s arms, and the hangings of Christ as a grown man, come to his demise on a cross… this stuff goes with Christianity like saffron robes and bronze statues go with Buddhism. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.
No, it wasn’t the hyper-symbology or the hierarchical enthusiasm of the boys in their vestments that bothered me. It was the music. The men and boys choir was workmanlike in their presentation and they treated us to some arrangements that we don’t often hear. But the hymns and the carols that were selected for the congregation to sing were insipid, particularly so the arrangements for some familiar carols that we were expected to pick our way through when the Mendelsohn and Haydn arrangements for the same songs were struggling in our consciousness to break free. Admittedly, the music director picked some lovely German and Austrian carols for the choir to sing. I think that was a sort of bow to the disappointment he knew we’d feel over being required to pick our way through Forest Green’s uninteresting version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
The disappointing music began and ended with the uninspired organist. Beth’s a soprano so she gets to sing the melody for the most part. The organist picked that single melodic thread on every piece of music he accompanied, lending no weight, no harmonic support to those of us not blessed with the soprano part. The organist, the choir and the congregation are challenged by the acoustics of the cathedral. By the time the sound waves of the first measure are bouncing off the concrete vaulted ceilings in the rear, we are practically done with the first verse. The organist’s solutrionb was to slow it all down to a dirge-like meter. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” has a lot in common “The Volga Boatmen” at this pace.
