Category: 52 Churches

This will come in handy in Turkey the week after next. I need to get some serious 52 Church work in — and am thinking specifically of the Blue Mosque.

“Sacred Destinations is an ecumenical guide to more than 1,250 sacred sites, holy places, pilgrimage destinations, religious architecture and sacred art in over 60 countries around the world. In addition to richly illustrated articles, there are photo galleries containing over 24,000 high-quality images plus detailed maps and lots of practical travel information. Happy exploring!”

via Sacred Sites at Sacred Destinations – Explore sacred sites, religious sites, sacred places.

I picked a Catholic church for my last Sunday in San Francisco, largely for two reasons: sentiment and novelty. Saints Peter and Paul Church presides over Washington Park in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, a twin towered handsome white church I’ve admired since I first lived in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It is the church where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were said to have been married — at least so said my bartender friends back in the day — but as it turns out Joltin’ Joe did not tie the knot to Marilyn there, but posed for photographs on its steps after their civil ceremony. DiMaggio’s funeral was held in the church in 1999 and he was married to his first wife in the church in 1939.

I have never witnessed a Latin Mass before andsince the church conducts one at 11:45 am on the first Sunday of every month, I took the opportunity while it was available.

Continue reading “Saints Peter and Paul, San Francisco – 52 Churches”

The most dreaded words in the Churbuck lexicon are: “Everybody get on your feet and put your hands together.” I am an unwilling, stolid, and confused participant in most group activities.
From square-dancing to collegiate acapella singing groups – David Churbuck is not your man. I dislike physical contact with strangers, am an awkward wooden hugger, air-kiss Europeans like a head injury victim, and get embarrassed by physical therapy sessions and trips to the chiropractor. I am, in short, the perfect repressed WASP who is content to let others sing and dance and who is happy to suffer in silence rather than submit to the sketchy intimacy of a massage or the group conviviality of line dancing.

My wife and children know this, and love to torment me in volunteering me for trips to the stage to be sawn in half by the magician. I have a severe autonomic physical reaction to this stress – a sort of perspiring performance anxiety – which escalates the more I am exhorted to sing, which I am reluctant to do as my only comfortable singing voice in somewhere in the key of Kermit the Frog.

Being an intrepid liturgical explorer, I woke early this morning in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood and decided to knock off this week’s church visit by simply going to the closest church in the neighborhood. Hence today was my first walk-to-church experience, one I am most grateful for because it underscores the founding question behind this project: I wonder what goes on inside of that place on any given Sunday?

Continue reading “St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church – 52 Churches”

A benefit of a high-travel lifestyle such as mine is the opportunity to visit an internationally infinite range of places of worship to visit during the course of the 52 Churches project. This Christmas and New Years found me and my family in San Francisco and since the project was never meant to be geographically restricted, I am trying to use my two weeks in the Bay Area to best effect, with some opportunities to visit faiths not found on Cape Cod and around Southeastern Massachusetts.

Christmas Eve services are one of the two high holy days in Christianity – the other being Easter Sunday – and the result is big crowds of the seasonally faithful. Still, crowds or not, the project was falling behind after missing last Sunday’s opportunity due to travel so the chance to experience an extraordinary church and service was too compelling to miss because of my usual claustrophobic aversion to crowds. I didn’t want to be the pious guy during the Christmas Eve party, but the opportunity to check out a super church was too good to miss.

This section is not meant to be the big Episcopalian discourse of this project, but simply an account of a beautiful Nativity, or Christmas mass conducted at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral – the third largest Episcopalian cathedral in the United States. When I was last in San Francisco in November I happened to drive up California Street to Nob Hill and, my eyes now tuned to look for possible churches to visit, I was captivated by the huge Gothic cathedral which reminded me of Paris’ Notre Dame but is obviously much younger, having been completed in the mid-1960s. I had never visited before, but resolved to make Grace my Christmas Eve stop, assuming a place so grand must put on the full show for the highest of Christian holidays.

Figure 1From Hysterical Bertha on Flickr

Continue reading “Christmas Eve “Midnight Mass” San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral – 52 Churches”

This week your intrepid correspondent ventured into the direction of Calvinism with a trip to The Presbyterian Church of Cape Cod located on Iyannough Road (Rte. 132) in West Barnstable near the Cape Cod Community College campus.

A big goal in this year-long journey is not so much spiritual discovery as an attempt to discern – after years of wondering – what the heck the difference is between the various Protestant arms of Christianity: Episcopal, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist …. I hope to finally figure out what stripes or spots separate the different animals in the religious zoo. Do Baptists baptize? Congregationalists congregate? Do Methodists have a method? Today I visited the Presbyterians, to be accurate he Orthodox Presbyterians.

First let me indulge in a little amateur armchair theological history with apologies to those who know better. The Reformation – was a very big deal in Europe in the 15^th century that split Christianity into Catholics and Protestants (emphasis on the “protest”). A number of religious thinkers (Martin Luther, Jan Hus) become disillusioned with perceived abuses by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which was rich, powerful, and doing some sleazy moves like selling “indulgences” to people who couldn’t afford them so their dead relatives would be absolved from sin and granted entry to heaven (there were a ton of other beefs, which got hashed out in the Diet of Worms (har-har) when the Holy Roman Empire summoned Luther to come get his comeuppance. The Reformation took hold in northern Europe, focusing not so much on spiritual issues as on governance, in other words: Reformists challenged corruption in the church and how it was run, looking for a more transparent system with more involvement by the laity (the people in the pews). To over-simplify, the Reformation set out to reform the Catholic Church and give more power to the people. (I feel like I just got a C+ on Mr. Keany’s 11^th grade European History course).

Luther got excommunicated (at least he didn’t get executed like Jan Hus) but his movement spread and found a home in Switzerland in Zurich (a guy named Zwingli) and Geneva (Calvin). The movement spread all over northern Europe and hit the British Isles when John Knox, a cohort of Calvin, brought it there from Geneva. Eventually the religion was declared the Church of Scotland.

Presbyterianism is (to be absurdly reductionist), a form of Protestantism that believes the fix is in — e.g. predestination –- and that the ruling model should be more collaborative and based on a council rather than Bishops, Cardinals, etc.. I won’t bother getting into the details based on a 90 minute visit and some web research – but the defining characteristics of Psrebyterianism would appear to be 1) origins in Scotland and the Scottish Reformation in 1560, 2) the guiding religious text called The Westminster Confession of Faith and 3) the system of church governance by pastors, a council and the laity. If you want to be further confused, read in depth about the various Presbyterian splinter movements.

Let me digress here to say there’s no wonder I have been confused for 40 years about the difference between a Methodist and a Presbyterian. I am sure every religion has its shadings and hues – but some seem to hang together tighter than others. I am sure there are gradients of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism that track to the many different flavors of Protestant Christianity, but to the casual visitor like myself, they seem like a lot of noise obscuring the basic signal.

Onwards to the service. I intended to visit the Touro Synagogue on Saturday morning for Shabbat, but the 70 mile drive for an 8:30 am service was daunting so I slept in and deferred this week’s visit to a “safe” bet closer to home. Not until late on Saturday night did I decide on the Presbyterians for no other reason than I wanted a “safe” church this weekend after the intensity of the last two weeks spent with the Quakers and the Victory Chapel.

The Cape Cod church is fairly young, with the visitor’s guide indicating the first phase of the chapel’s construction was completed in 1981. It is a one story building with a little steeple. The interior has low ceilings and the feel of an office building – meaning the notion of “narthex” or “porch” is not strong in the architectural design.

I arrived, hung up my winter coat, said hello to a deacon, signed the guest book and took my back row seat in a room about 50 by 50 feet. The wall behind the altar was glassed by a series of tall windows looking out into the gray tree trunks behind the church. A piano provided the only music – an austere contrast to last week’s large electrified and amplified band at the Victory Chapel. A bank of poinsettias, a red candle and a few other embellishments put one a little into the Christmas spirit. There were no pews, but instead rows of padded chairs fitted with a wire basket that held a Bible and Hymnal. About two dozen men and women filled the seats to close to half-capacity and the same deacon who greeted me made some announcements.

Following the announcements the pastor,  Reverend James A. La Belle,  took the podium and began the service. The liturgy and order of the service was very familiar with a greeting, and then, while standing, a call to worship, hymn, invocation, then a rote statement called the Confession of Faith, followed by an Ascription of Praise.

The pastor read Isaiah 51.21-52.12 from the old Testament. I followed along with the Bible taken from underneath the seat in front of me. I have never read the Bible cover to cover or in any organized Bible study group, so I have some issues finding chapters and verses, but the pastor kindly pointed out the page number. The Bible was not a King James version but another which I failed to note. It was printed in large type and the verses were laid out in a strange “stanza” arrangement more like poetry than the usual eye-squinting justified pica type I am accustomed to.

The operative word in Presbyterian liturgy is “confession” – a bit strange to my ears because I associate a confession with a booth, a screen, and a priest in the other booth. The service had a Confession of Faith, a Confession of Sin and that was followed by a Silent Confession of God’s People. Reverend La Belle delivered a considerable and eloquent pastoral prayer, which, because of its duration, I initially took to be his “sermon.” His prayer – which I estimate at 10 minutes, was directed at God and had a good line about the congregation coming together to help each other sharpen their faith the way “iron sharpens iron.” That pastoral prayer was concluded by the Lord’s Prayer. I noted that instead of saying “and forgive us our trespasses” the Presbyterian version says “and forgive us our debts” – an entirely appropriate 2009 TARP sentiment in my opinion.

The offering was made, I dropped a five into the bowl, and wondered for a second about the financial affairs of any congregation and how much income came from the offering plate. The thought passed, a hymn was sung, I actually tried singing, and realized my hymn voice is very basso profundo in its native tone-deafedness.

Then came The Proclamation of the Word of God. This was the sermon part and it was a good one – a long but very well argued and logically presented dissection of Mark 8.31-33, a passage from the Gospel according to Mark (patron saint of Venice) where Jesus says he will go to Jerusalem to die and be resurrected which earns him a rebuke from Peter. The whole death of Christ meme struck me as pretty out of season given we’re a week or two away from the birth of — as my late atheist* father would put it: “The Beej” — the Baby Jesus — but Reverence La Belle tied that knot neatly by persuasively arguing that Christ was born to die (giving rise to images of Hell’s Angels mottos and Bruce Springsteen songs) and in dying became the Son of God. I thought La Belle was a very good Deconstructionist of the text, putting me in mind of my Comparative Literature classes at Yale in the 1970s when deconstruction and the literal analysis of texts drove me nearly nutty with overweening critical analysis.

Random observations:

• This was solid Christianity. Stern, to the point, and very based on the fundamentals without being fundamentalist.
• The Presbyterian God is a stern god.
• This was not fun or entertaining but solemn and pensive.
• The word took precedence over the architecture or the music.
• The crowd was well dressed and I spotted one bow tie on the morning I decided not to wear a bowtie.
• I wondered if most American Presbyterians have Scottish ancestors.
• Rutherford B. Hayes, Bob Hope, and Ulysses S. Grant were Presbyterians.
• Parking lot had no trends in automotive selection worth noting.
• New churches don’t smell like churches. Yet.
• This is the second weekend in a row I went to the discount big box store after services.
• A Presbyterian cocktail consists of whiskey, ginger ale and Coca Cola. And is ordered as a “Press” as in, “Barkeep I should like a V.O. Press.”

  Next weekend ….. off to California on Saturday so …. Either a synagogue on Friday night or a church in California.

*On the topic of athiesm, this is a nice observation by the late David Foster Wallace in his recent posthumously published short story in the New Yorker:

“If you consider the usual meaning of “atheism,” which, as I understand it, is a kind of anti-religious religion [emp. mine], which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof, human autonomy, and self-determination …”

An advantage to the 52 Church project (more accurately the 52 Houses of Worship project) happening on Cape Cod is my proximity to relatively old churches and traditions. For example the oldest American synagogue is an hour away in Newport, Rhode Island; Plymouth is a mere 30 miles away, and the oldest Quaker meeting in the country is less than ten miles to the north in East Sandwich.

There are some significant churches on my mental list that I look forward to, either because of historical reasons or pure curiosity, and one of those is the Quaker meeting in Sandwich. This morning I went with great anticipation for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the historical importance of Quakerism to Cape Cod. I felt a bit guilty indulging in the Quaker meeting so soon in the project, but it was what I decided to do, so I did it.

“Quaker” is a perjorative term affixed to this particular practice of religious dissent and faith which began in 1650 in England when a judge dismissed the faithful as “quakers” because the power of their beliefs made them tremble before God. It arrived in Massachusetts shortly after the Mayflower, and its early adherents were severely punished, chastised, and even put to death for their beliefs, leading some to emigrate out of Plymouth to Sandwich, the oldest town on Cape Cod, where a meeting was founded in 1658. Other persecuted Quakers fled the North Shore of Massachusetts and founded the first white settlement on Nantucket. Over time many of the most prosperous whaling fortunes (Coffin, Howland, Folger) were Quaker fortunes. I strong recommend Peter Nichols “Final Voyage” and Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea” for a clear look at Massachusetts Quakers and their relationship to the seacoast, industry, and the first American fortunes. My whaling captain ancestor, Thomas Chatfield, was not a Quaker.

But I digress. To the meetinghouse and its remarkable service.

The meetinghouse was built in 1810 in Kennebec, Maine, dismantled, barged down the coast, and reassembled by the numbers on its present location  north of the King’s Highway (Route 6A) in East Sandwich. It is on Quaker Meetinghouse Road and sits on a small hill in a wooded copse of locust and holly trees. The architecture is quite severe and ultra-New England, with weathered shingles and remarkably plain but beautiful detail work.

I arrived ten minutes early and entered the door as a woman stepped outside and declared “there’s a fire in the stove, make yourself at home.”

I stepped into the narthex/entryway, signed my name in the guest book, dropped some money into a box labelled the “building maintenance fund” and guessed at which closed door I should open. I stepped into a moderately sized room with rows of pews facing to the northwest and another set facing back towards the door. In the middle of the room was a woodstove and the chimney rose up to the ceiling and made a 90-degree turn to the chimney on the western wall. One woman sat in the pews. She did not turn when I entered. I found my place in the back row corner seat and made myself comfortable. It was so silent in the room that I didn’t dare snap a photo of the interior. This shot is from the Meeting’s website:

Not a word was said in the room for the next 70 minutes.

More people arrived and the only sounds in the room were the soft ticking of an old clock by the door, the rustling of one man’s synthetic jacket, an occasional airplane flying overhead unseen in the blue sky, the ticking of the woodstove as it slowly warmed up the chilly room, the shifting coals as the logs burned down, three sneezes that were unanswered with “gesundheits” or “god bless you’s,” the occasional rustling as someone shifted in their pew, the turning of a page as a man in the front pew read a Bible. This was not a place to have a cough, a rumbling stomach, or the hiccups.

No one preached. No hymns were sung. No prayers were said outloud.

I was attending an unprogrammed meeting. That means there was no minister or service, but instead a meeting of friends to contemplate God. I’ll quote from the Meeting pamphlet:

“We invite you to share the hospitality of our Meeting House and join in our unprogrammed Meeting. The Meeting asks that you listen attentively, both to the remarkable harmony of the silent waiting and to the minustry that may arise from the silence. We ask you to wait with patience and openness for an understanding of Friends Meeting.

Meeting really begins only when we are all joined in the silent waiting upon God that is known among Quakers as Centering Down.

Speaking, when there is any, arises from a deep religious experience and is preceded by the conviction that this experience must be shared. This is sometimes senses as an upwelling of the spirit, sometimes as an insight following study, meditation and prayer. It is always humble, always a result of the most earnest seeking. It is not casual or argumentative and seldom is humorous.”

The meeting ended around 11 am when the same woman who welcomed me stood up and shook hands with another person. I greeted the people around me, there were introductions by all, and some announcements of forthcoming meetings, food drives, and pot luck suppers.

Random observations:

• I was perhaps the youngest person there
• There were too few people to make any pithy sweeping demographic statement about the parking lot
• I want to return to this service more than any of the previous three experiences

What I thought about during the 70 minutes:

• Whaling and why Quakers dominated that industry (I have no idea).
• William Penn
• Quaker Oats
• Why such a silent, benign, pacifist gathering would be persecuted 350 years ago
• The branches of the bare locust tree through the antique glass windows and how that swirling effect is like my eyesight now
• How completely timeless the room was — nothing in it other than the clothing and eyeglasses we wore and the three electrical ceiling lights was from this century
• Richard M. Nixon (his mother was Quaker and his father converted)
• The overalls the bearded man who tended the woodstove wore
• Would someone speak?
• This was the quietest I have ever been for an extended period of time
• How much I enjoy this project

Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Religious Society of Friends. Next week, I may go Catholic.

I resumed my spiritual smorgasbord with a trip to Hyannis to attempt to attend services at the Brazilian Assembly of God church on Mary Dunn Road. I pulled into the parking lot at 9:45 – having had no luck in finding the service times as the church has no website – but things looked very sleepy, so with only a few minutes left on the clock until 10 am (which I assume is the default start time for many Sunday services) I fell back on Plan B and continued north to Route 6A, the Kings Highway, and turned into the Unitarian Church of Barnstable across the street from the Trayser Museum on Cobb’s Hill above the intersection of 6A and Captain Phinney’s Lane. This was not an entirely compulsive decision as I have admired the church for many years and wanted to have my first Unitarian experience somewhere in the course of my 52 visits.

The service didn’t begin until 10:30, so I drove down to Barnstable Harbor, parked the car, and listened to an excellent 1973 Boston Music Hall concert by the Grateful Dead that featured a flawless Here Comes Sunshine/Weather Report Suite from the Wake of the Flood album. That was an appropriate warm-up for my introduction to what may be one of the most liberal of the Christian denominations, if indeed “Christian” is even an appropriate label to fix to the “UU”. Unitarianism is very much a Boston tradition – the church has its headquarters on Beacon Hill and the church is identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister and perhaps the foremost American philosopher of the mid-19^th century along with his peer, Henry David Thoreau. When I studied 19^th century American religious and intellectual history in college, the influence of the Transcendentalists on the Unitarian church made me make a mental note to check it out one day – a note that took 30 years to realize.

The Unitarian Universalist Church is a liberal religion – more a congregation of people bound spiritually than by religion – which has no overt Christian dogma or reliance on scripture. Wikipedia has a long definition, here’s an excerpt:

“Although Unitarian Universalist congregations and fellowships tend to retain some Christian traditions, such as Sunday worship with a sermon and the singing of hymns, they do not necessarily identify themselves as Christians, nor do they necessarily subscribe to Christian beliefs. The extent to which the elements of any particular faith tradition are incorporated into one’s personal spiritual practices is a matter of personal choice in keeping with Unitarian Universalism’s creedless, non-dogmatic approach to spirituality and faith development.”

None of this was known to me as I entered the church, so I entered with an open mind after wrestling with the front door for a few tugs until a nice woman (subsequently identified as the Reverend Dr. Kristen Harper) popped it open and bid me to enter. I took a back row corner seat in the straight backed pew, and pulled a guest card and history from the hymnal rack. The church was built in 1905, and was the eastern parish in the original Congregationalist parishes of Barnstable founded in 1646 (the western parish was the last church I visited, but that congregation is Congregationalist ((which is the antecedent for Unitarianism according to Wikipedia}). Reverend Harper, as luck would have it, posted some thoughts on how to define Unitarian Universalism on the church website last month. I suggest reading her reflection for a more personal attempt to define the “UU”.

The choir was rehearsing with great gusto as I filled out the guest card and blinked wetly with feeble eyes at the big room (note to self, need to read a basic guide to church architecture so I can show off with words like “narthex”). The podium, or altar, was simple, with a back wall displaying several bas relief carvings of a Star of David, Islamic Crescent and Star, Yin and Yang, Cross, and of course the Flaming Chalice symbol of Unitarian Universalism. No Jesus. No Virgin. No overt displays of any religion’s totems over another’s. The church was built in 1907 — replacing an earlier structure destroyed by fire in 1905 – and was designed by Guy Lowell, the architect of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The pews filled up and folding chairs were brought in to accommodate the late arrivals. Reverend Harper rang a bell and the organ played a nice prelude of Thanksgiving hymns, including one I remember liking as a ten-year old, the classic Dutch hymn of Thanksgiving, “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Reverend Harper made her introduction and welcome, noting that the congregation welcomed gay, lesbian and transgendered visitors. The chalice was lit, the congregation rose, and in unison made their affirmation. A hymn was sung, then a nice communal type of ritual was performed, with the congregation rising and walking up the center aisle to the altar where each picked a pebble from a bowl and dropped it into another while giving silent thanks. I was tempted to participate, but have decided not to engage in any rituals such as communion or other altar activities out of respect for the congregants and for fear of giving offense through lack of protocol.

At the back of the hymnal was a series of readings, or prayer-like statements, known as “responsive readings” written by many noted authors including Abraham Lincoln and Rabindrinath Tagore, the Indian Nobel Prize winner. We read “To Loose the Fetters of Injustice” (I forget who the author was).

The reading was “The Arc of the Universe” by Charlie Clements and the sermon was entitled “Guest at Your Table: Water Justice,” which fit neatly into my preconceptions that the UU would carry on the Transcendentalist koan of a “sermon in every stone.” Reverend Harper was a very eloquent and persuasive speaker and rooted her message that inequities in the distribution and availability of fresh water in the Third World and among the poor in local realities of drought and water use on Cape Cod. She kept me wide awake, the Churbuck test of any sermon.

Random observations:

• Christ was never mentioned, nor any Bible quoted
• The music and the setting were traditional. Juxtaposed with the absence of any overt Christian trappings, the music made this an unChurch-Church experience.
• Barack Obama and Martin Luther King were cited by Reverend Harper, who is of African-American descent and who did a wonderful job quoting Rev. King’s “If not now, when?” speech
• The average age of congregation tilted to 50
• There were two dozen children and teens present
• I didn’t see many twenty or thirty year olds
• The sexes were equally represented
• The parking lot had a high quotient of Mini Coopers and Subarus, this was not an SUV or BMW crowd

Next week — I have to catch up on a missed Sunday due to travel from San Francisco to Boston earlier in the month — so I may attempt a double-header this coming weekend with a synagogue visit on Saturday and a church on Sunday. Oh, and church recommendations are always appreciated. My neighbor, the Right Reverends Jeremy and Nicole are giving me some pointers in exchange for the loan of my clam rake. I will be in San Francisco over the Christmas holidays and thought I’d hit the Zen Center and perhaps Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, Glide Memorial on Van Ness or the North Beach church where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio tied the knot.