A Sunday on Sabbatical

A family leaving church early on Sunday morning caught me getting ready to pull out of the rectory driveway at about 10:45 am. Carolyn and I had decided that we'd go into Boston to Trinity Church for our second Sunday on sabbatical. Well, now that we're so relaxed and unplugged from everything, we had forgotten about the time change, and it wasn't until about 10:20 that we realized it was 10:20 and not 9:20. So we raced around, got showered and out the door as fast as we could, and put the pedal to the metal (won't say how fast -- I think it really stinks when someone driving a Prius is speeding) on our way into Boston. I had fixed us each an egg sandwich to eat in the car and had a thermos of coffee ready, too.

Our Sunday mornings are usually so well organized! This is going to take some practice, not having to be somewhere (right next door) on Sunday by 7:30 am.

So, we pulled up to the corner of Clarendon and Boylston Streets at 11:13 (two minutes till church starts) and I let Carolyn out so that I could go find a free parking spot on the street, figuring that Sunday morning in Boston isn't at all like the rest of the week for parking and I'd be able to grab a spot somewhere within a block or so.

Right.

Ten minutes later, after driving around several blocks, then all the way down to the Public Garden and back, I finally pulled into the garage across from Trinity, and ran into church (in as dignified a way as I could, of course), just as the acolytes were putting the cross and torches away after the procession. Slipped down the side aisle to the back, and into the pew with Carolyn right after the Confession and Absolution. I was there in time to be absolved of my lead foot, by the way. It was the first Morning Prayer service we had been to in quite some time. Good sermon. (Sermons are sort of like meals -- they always taste better when someone else is doing the cooking.) The choir did a Duke Ellington piece between the lessons ("Come Sunday") which I thought was great, and at the end of the service there was an alto sax solo postlude from the chancel -- improvisations on the Richard Webster choral benediction the choir had just sung from the back of the church. Clearly a theme here.

Turns out that there was going to be a concert at 3:00 in the afternoon of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts with the Trinity Choir in collaboration with the Berklee College of Music Concert Jazz Orchestra.

And then we also learned that the Price Lecture would be held at 1:30 pm, featuring Chris Hedges, author, New York Times correspondent, and currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton. Chris was a classmate of mine at Harvard Divinity School in the early 80s. I have read a couple of his books (War is a Force that Gives us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway) and had been following his career at the Times, and so I decided this might be a good chance to reconnect after 25 years.

So, after church was over, Carolyn and I decided to make a Copley Square day out of our foray into the city for church. Lunch at Paparazzi, then back to Trinity for the Price Lecture. Chris was ostensibly talking about his latest book, I Don't Believe in Atheists, but he didn't say anything about atheists until the very end when he referred to a series of debates he has had with both right wing fundamentalists and atheists, and how equally frustrating they both were. His thesis is that they share a common obsession with certainty that leads them both, albeit in different forms, to their respective fundamentalisms. His talk was much more about the career that led him from his Harvard Divinity School education, and particularly his courses in social ethics with James Luther Adams, to Central America in the 80s, the Middle East and the Balkans in the 90s, and virtually every other hot spot on the globe to cover some of the last two decades' worst conflicts. I had a chance to speak with him briefly afterward. I was most interested to get his journalist's impression of the work of David Ray Griffin in The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Griffin is a retired professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate School of Theology and has written a very provocative book with, as the title suggests, some very disturbing, unanswered questions. Chris had not read the book. I'm going to send it to him so that, hopefully, he can disabuse me of the idea that higher ups in a certain former president's administration had any complicity in the events of 9/11, and I can once again sleep at night without worrying that such things could actually happen in this country of ours. Alternatively, if Griffin is on to something, Chris just might be the guy with the bully pulpit to bring some things to light that have until now been shrouded in darkness. What I care most about is the truth, which one would hope a professional journalist does, too.

From that happy topic, we went back upstairs at Trinity to a nearly packed house for the Duke Ellington concert. What great music! The Duke was no theologian, but he sure knew how to touch the heart string. The only thing "sacred" about some of these songs as far as I could tell was that they had some mention of heaven, or a title like "Tell me it's the truth" (with all the books of the Bible being narrated by the choir), or another titled "In the Beginning." There were some really great soloists, and some amazing college-age musicians who sounded like they'd been doing this stuff for decades. The kid on piano was amazing (Michael Palma from Dallas), and there was a pretty awesome bari sax in there, too. Perhaps the highlight was a guy with a PhD in tap dancing. Thomas DeFranz floated across the chancel like nothing you've ever seen. He really does have a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU and a BA from Yale.

So this is what Sunday is like for other folks! We walked out of the church energized. If only they had had Evensosng to close the day! I sent Anne Bonnyman, the Rector, a note on Monday morning to thank her for a great day at Trinity. She reminded me that, in fact, there was a 6 pm service of Eucharist that we could have stayed for!

But we were home by 5 pm. And it had been a good day -- even if we did have to pay $20 to park.