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April 16, 2009

By Nathan Brockman

This is the story of St. Paul’s Chapel.

No, this is.

The story of St. Paul’s begins when the world comes in during Sunday morning worship. Every year, more people than there are Episcopalians visit the chapel, because of the role the chapel played after the September 11 attacks. None of the tourists are here for the same reasons we are.

Who is we?

We are the church.

The swirl of tourists moves in a circle through the exhibit space during a service. What do we hope people feel when they leave, regardless of why they came?

*

There wouldn’t be a story if people hadn’t made a bucket brigade during the Great Fire of 1776 — a line of people stretched to the Hudson, re-baptizing the chapel.

*

A team is planning a labyrinth. It will go where the pews once were, and there will be music and people praying for the labyrinth walkers. There will also be a healing garden outside.

*

Think of all who own St. Paul’s: A Ground Zero iron-worker stands out front talking. The sun is rising over Brooklyn. This is our church, he says, angry it has been reopened to the public for services.

Hear the Manhattan version of quiet and stillness inside, when the A train rumbles beneath your feet. Here are the beds where the homeless slept. Here are the crypts where the dead still rest.

*

A bone in the grass prompts a call to security. The thought is that it might be from a victim’s body. Then someone suggested a rat had brought it up from a grave. “It’s a pig rib, from someone’s lunch,” said security.

Here is St. Paul’s. Here is the Wren-like architecture, ecclesial echo of St. Martin-in the- Fields, standing as construction crews dig up the street-bed: tar, cobble, dirt, root, mud, water. Hear the footfalls of the Dutch and Native Americans. Wind moves wheat and wetland grasses.

*

There is a priest at St. Paul’s who sees a liturgical laboratory, finding ways to enhance hospitality and participation. He wants to move the altar, creating a worship space of two rooms.

*

The Archivist knows St. Paul’s was an outpost for the British army during the revolution. In what dingy corner do we hide other stories?

People come to St. Paul’s because it was known as a 9/11 sanctuary. They don’t know of the fractured volunteer community and staff, the bickering, the intense pressure to be the face of hope across the street from the site of a mass murder.

*

Let’s make it a shrine, rather than a tourist site. Tourists might become pilgrims. Here is a woman in the church quietly asking if anyone has ever really agreed on what a church is.

*

Think 1766. The big-wigs of Trinity Church decide to build a chapel, a divine outpost where people were building new homes away from the port and the pirates to the south. St. Paul’s was the first mission church planted in exurbia.

*

A church should be quiet during worship. I can’t believe they let us in here during a church service. I can’t believe we let them in during a church service.

*

This is St. Paul’s Chapel, whose iron fence I stood against when I was arrested at the Republican National Convention for protesting the war in Iraq. The nice church people gave me some bottled water through the bars of the fence.

*

There is a priest who says that what makes St. Paul’s unique are the two congregations that gather on Sunday morning.

For the tourists, I want them to have felt they were in a church, to become curious about church, to unseal some questions. I want the worshipers to feel surrounded by questions, different experiences, and the richness of the world.

Here is St. Paul’s, its doors open. Maybe that is the problem with St. Paul’s.

*

Here is St. Paul’s in the rain, the kind of rain that reminds you New York is a maritime city, the old steeple somberly gazing on a patchwork of umbrellas describing what it is like to be held in rain, the steeple being perfectly itself, perfectly real and fragile.

*

Concert venue. Convert venue.

*

To have an identity is to be. Identity is the new ontology.

We’re never talking about a church. We’re talking about ourselves. Which is why there is a problem with St. Paul’s and there isn’t. I’ve seen the problem with St. Paul’s and it is me.

I like eating lunch by the churchyard sycamores. When it is winter, I miss my time there.

*

I don’t know what holiness is, but after visiting St. Paul’s, I came away feeling like I wanted to make the world better. You know even in Exton, Pennsylvania, where I’m from, we have hard times and people who need help.

*

I’ve been where the noises of babies become part of the worship, not so much a distraction. But the noises of babies are not the noises of tourists who should know better.

There is a priest who says we might worship like the old ones did, creating an echo of heaven in which to dance
praise
sing
pray
offer ourselves,
at least for a short time,
into a certain divine oblivion.

Nathan Brockman is editor of Trinity News.

Soundtrack: Max Richter, A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind