As I write it is Holy Week, and there is no better week to experience what worship is like in The Cathedral of All Saints—a living building which allows for the drama of a living faith. (Maundy Thursday is perhaps my favorite service.) You can find the worship schedule HERE, including Easter Sunday morning with Bishop Jeremiah Williamson. An Easter Choir Festival with several choirs, free and open to all, will be held on May 4 at 4PM, preceded by an organ recital at 3:30PM.
My role as arts missioner has recently led me to offer Gilded Age Art Tours for First Friday Albany, and my artist’s eye regularly gluts itself on the imagery of the cathedral in preparation. Our living building responds to my every new inquiry, and I experience its artists and artisans as still present. My eyes fly over the interior as one peers into a beehive and sees a honeycomb of hexagons replicating in all directions. Each new detail I find reveals skilled hands hovering like bees, who, having collected the grains of their artistry elsewhere, came here and left sweetness in yet another space they carved for it. (Read an article about our busy Cathedral carver HERE.)
I imagine these creatives engaged in the concerns of their era, not far removed from ours: reconciling science and faith, industrialization and preservation, politics and human rights. Like the Hudson River School painters, they drew inspiration from the generation or two that preceded them—artist and philosopher John Ruskin, who was himself inspired by the Oxford movement in England—and studied the “book of nature,” which by then included the geologic record. No two carvings are the same in our Cathedral because no two things are the same in nature.
(Read the Albany Institute of History and Art’s “Making of the Hudson River School” HERE and read about John Ruskin’s relationship to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History HERE. Find a recent conversation on faith between Dean Harding and MIT physics professor emeritus Ian Hutchinson HERE. Come to the Cathedral for a presentation by a metalsmith artist and medieval armor maker on April 27. Read about a recent book by MIT professor Arthur Bahr on the medieval Pearl Manuscript, which he gave a talk on at the Cathedral in 2023.)
We most likely have J.P. Morgan to thank for our east facing great altar and side chapels with rib-vaulted ceilings. And the founders of Stanford and Clarkson Universities, and the Trasks of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs for our Belgian choir stalls, and the Cornings for much else. Much of what they gave bears tender inscription in memory of their loved ones. But as with ancient cathedrals, it was many relatively small donations which made it a living building in conversation with God and God’s people—offerings of those who worship here—including preaching, organ music, singing of the choir and the congregation, studies and classes—varieties of service to God and people which continue to fill the Cathedral with inner light that does not come by any other way.
And so I am part of that light as I bring a flashlight to my tours. To examine the cathedral and articulate in the way I must to lead a tour makes me anxious, to be honest, but not in the way you might think. It is because the cathedral is a living building, it is not an object. As Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou, one may be called into relationship with a work of art as one is with another person—a dynamic subject-to-subject conversation in which the other is not a regarded as a means, but rather as an end. Therefore during a tour I have the strong sense that what I say is one thing, but what the Cathedral thinks is another.
How could I attribute the capacity for living relationship to a mere building that regularly (and peevishly it would seem, if it is indeed alive) demands expensive attention and repair—do I experience it as an Other because of its aggravation? This would mean the Cathedral is an edifice that I have made into an idol. But unlike an idol, the Cathedral does not allow me to objectify it or comprehend it—rather it overwhelms me when I pry into its imagery too much and sends me to stare at a blank wall. And so I approach it apprehensively and with respect.
And I don’t write what I write because of its imagery, but rather because of what its art signifies. But even while trying to keep in mind what it intends, the Cathedral’s imagery clogs my sense of prayer when my eye has glutted on it. This weakness on my part does relate to the Cathedral’s intention to incorporate humanness as part of its organic structure—its intention to awe—and relates to the theology on which the first Gothic Cathedral was built.
Very simply put, to affirm the beauty of God through beautiful things which fall short exposes our spiritual poverty and increases our longing to get closer to God. (Who, by the way, is ineffable and so on we go, adding points to our arches to shift out their weight against flying buttresses, filling the newly obtainable heights with colored glass that tell biblical stories by which we know God through the human person of Christ……)
Abbot Suger, who built St. Denis near Paris in the 12th century, wrote something beyond and like the above while raising money for the work which was done atop a much older monastic church serving its community. Likewise, our cathedral building (which was built after a hospital, school, convent, and choir were founded) needs grants and donations, and can never be a museum. It demands that we worship in it, and the way we worship in it must involve our whole selves, as it was built to communicate with us, and even with the cosmos.
When people, music and incense fill its walls conceived and raised from a matrix of sacred words and images defining sacred space, the angels carved in stone grow light as if rising on prayer. As we share in the Eucharist, the sun pecks at our windows with its commentary on the stained glass by illuminating some parts and obscuring others. No two services are the same and the sun never gives the same tour twice. Come, hear, see and be.
