Maundy Thursday: Ruminations in a plague year

St. Thomas Church (Episcopal), Fifth Avneue, New York City

I haven't been to a Maundy Thursday service for a while. I considered finding one to go to this year; the virus put paid to that.

I might possibly have gone to one at St. John's in the Village, the Episcopal Church I belonged to when I lived in Baltimore. But I don't recall going to one. And I would recall. Because the drama of a well-done Maundy Thursday service can keep your soul going for a year, at least.

I do recall many Maundy Thursday services at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, NYC, in the years I lived in Manhattan.

Like the end of the rumble scene in the original Broadway production of West Side Story--which I saw when I was nine years old--the lighting of the St. Thomas Maundy Thursday service lingers in my mind, so close to the surface that I can summon it in a flash.

I can summon it in any season. I can summon it in any location. I can summon it when I am happy, when I'm scared, when I'm in limbo. Like now. The limbo of a modern day plague, not sending us to church to get closer to our god, but locking us into our homes to avoid a pestilence. I know the science is the modern way, and must be for now, but I wonder where the soul is. Still, that's not quite what this is about. Or maybe it is. You be the judge.

St. Thomas is an inordinately beautiful church, which, of course, enhances any experience of it. While I was a member, the rector was the Rev. John GB Andrew MBE DD, a man who demanded the best from everyone from altar guild ladies (I was one, reportedly the youngest he had ever invited to labor with that essential crew) to curates and right up to the members of the only residential Boy's Choir in the United States.

Father Andrew himself celebrated the Maundy Thursday evening service.  As usual at the highest of the high church rituals, there was the full Boy's Choir supported by the professional Men's Choir. There were additional celebrants; it took a lot of priests to accommodate the eucharist for what was, almost without fail, a packed church.  

Fr. Andrew died in 1996, after retiring for a second time from the church he served after St. Thomas. His death was  another one of those rents in the universe--or at least, in my life in the universe--that can never be rewoven.

A father like no other

Fr. Andrew and I had a stormy relationship, both of us strong-willed. He was more conservative than I, and did not--until he changed his mind--believe in ordaining women, and I did. But for reasons I will never understand, he consistently involved me in the life of the church, first with the altar guild, later as a delegate to an ecumenical meeting for NYC, and later still as a leader of a group especially for women, involving drinkies, dinner and a speaker. He supported me when I invited a financial analyst to speak during Lent, going so far as to send a "dear dummy" sort of letter to a visiting priest from Flyover Country who objected to that program. Fr. Andrew wrote to him, so nicely, that it was incumbent upon Anglicans to support themselves and family and friends, and, if possible charities--and that took money. So we all had to learn how to make and manage it for that purpose. So be quiet.

I left the church for a while. Don't ask why; I probably can't articulate it myself. But I often flee when things get too close, too cosy, too essential. Then a college student I had hired for the summer to help us renovate a house we had bought in the Hudson Highlands demanded to be taken to St. Thomas. Apparently, I never stopped talking about it. Probably because I never stopped missing it. (That feeling remains to this day.)

My husband had a trip to Oregon coming up and had to fly out of JFK at dark-thirty on a Sunday morning. "Oh, good," Margaret said. "So I'll go with you and we can have breakfast and then go to church at St. Thomas."

Drat. Foiled. Had to do it. Damn, wouldn't you know? John Andrew was the celebrant that day at the 11 a.m. service. And drat, didn't Margaret insist we had to go to coffee hour in the parish house? Sigh. In for a penny....

And so there we stood, mingling, with me introducing Margaret to the friends I'd left behind, sort of. (I still saw them, just not in church.) And then...yes, it was inevitable. Fr. Andrew came up behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and he hugged me and said,  "I've been praying for this."

How could I fail to respond? I didn't fail. I returned to St. Thomas, my spiritual home then, now and always (although St. John's in the Village, Baltimore, is a close runner up.)

Is a low church as good as a high church?

I have been empty in Cornwall, bereft of a good high church in the land that invented the Anglican Church, the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have searched. But they are afraid of incense, afraid of failing to attract Protestants while simultaneously failing those of us who love the beauty of the liturgy, music and elegance of the high church. I could go Anglo-Catholic...but that's not me, either. I am, top to bottom, a high-church Anglican.

This year, any church I might have gone to is empty, shuttered by a plague.

St. Thomas tackles the plague

This year my once and always church, blessed St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, NYC,  is also empty. Only the celebrants and recorded organ music were there on Maundy Thursday, filming the service to post on the church website because of the virus. I suppose one could connect this with the plague years...but back then, people would have gone to church, thinking that doing so might prevent their getting the huge purple buboes that, most of the time, meant death. Once they had acquired the disease, they generally quarantined themselves. And mostly died. (The Black Death lasted in Europe, on and off, from 1346 to1353.)

Today New York City is quarantined, and is suffering from more deaths from coronavirus than they needed to because President Trump failed to act. Mayor Bill deBlasio and NY governor Cuomo have acted. But still, so harmful is the virus that St. Thomas Church, a beacon to Anglicans in the heart of Manhattan, is dark to preserve its congregation.

On Maundy Thursday 2020, arguably the most solemn day of the ligturgical year, St. Thomas was dark, except for pools of light on the celebrant. Ordinarily, the nave would be filled with light until the very end, allowing the congregation to read the Prayer Book and use the hymnal to sing the abundant hymns always included at St. Thomas, as many as the liturgy allows.

But even filmed--even minus a congregation whose rustling of hymnals is a substrate to any service--it is dramatic. There is the sudden plunge into darkness, followed immediately by the sounds of  the celebrant scrubbing the stone altar with water and palm leaves in the dark.

In an ordinary year, there is a moment...a long moment...during which the congregation, of one accord, remains very still. The lights come up gradually, just enough for people to see their way out. There is no voluntary, the organ music ordinarily played as the congregation exits.

The drama of the moment is missing from the video. It is not missing from my heart and soul. It is there, it has to be there. The human soul must surely be more than this virus, this locking away of the infirm, the rounding up of the rest, the hiatus in the education of children. The deaths of the healers. It MUST be more than that.

If this virus does nothing for us but convince us that human life is precious, but all the life around us that we are missing as we huddle indoors is just as precious, maybe it will have done its job.  Maybe we will be able to take the time--and pains--to worship, whether at a St. Thomas, a rural chapel, a woodland, a beach or wherever one finds the numinous.

Without the numinous, human life is tedious.  As tedious, to some of us, as being locked down to avoid a plague.

I think, after this is through, I shall have to find a successor to St. Thomas. If I find it, then leave it, then return...well, it's what I've always done. Possibly my search for the numinous is so intense that I simply step away for a while at times.

But 14 years is too damn long.

Copyright 2020, Laura Harrison McBride