Consecration of the new Bishop of Maryland

This event took place over about three hours at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday morning. The building is a very beautiful High Gothic cathedral. In best American entrepreneurship, it was built – i.e., completed -in just 83 years (Those Europeans! Some of their cathedrals are still not finished!) Since the Baltimore Cathedral is too small, it was decided to use the National Cathedral about 40 miles away. It seats about 3,000. http://pecf.cathedral.org/cathedral/discover/history.shtml or
http://pecf.cathedral.org/cathedral/discover/facts.shtml. It’s the sixth largest cathedral in the world and the second largest in the U.S.A. after St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan.

This allowed for a maximum attendance from the thirty-six parishes in the Diocese of Maryland. It also permitted the seating of a 300-voice choir in the nave and a brass-and-tympani ensemble. Six of us from the family sang. It was an exhausting day with everybody up in the early summer dawn and in the car by 0630 for the drive to D.C. By 0800 we were all seated in the choir stalls for the pre-game warm-up (i.e., rehearsal). All this was after a lot of rehearsing regionally over the past few weeks and then last Wednesday at the National Cathedral itself.

The new bishop of Maryland, Eugene Sutton, has been a canon at the National Cathedral for the last eight years and his wife, a church musician, is employed at St. Alban’s Episcopal School right next door. He was brought up as a Baptist and only became an Episcopalian as an adult. He is now one of several black bishops in the American wing of the Anglican ‘communion’. He is a muscular liberal and an advocate of ‘liberation theology’ in an American setting, i.e., and taking the gospel message to the poor and downtrodden. He spent the day after his consecration, for example, at an inner-city soup kitchen in Baltimore.

This is interesting given that nearly all Episcopal parishes are middle-class and white, and that there were relatively few black faces visible in the choir (I focussed on the choir because, of the identifiable groups taking part in the consecration service, I am guessing that the choir was perhaps most representative of parish demographics). But Bishop Sutton was elected bishop overwhelmingly in the grassroots, quite democratic process used in the Episcopal Church to elect bishops, a mixture of clergy and laity. This tells me that the middle-class, white adherents of the Episcopal Church are as a whole quite liberal, eager for improvements in race relations and desirous of doing something to make an end to poverty. Perhaps it is the same wave that is carrying Barack Obama towards the White House.

I was brought up a Baptist too. Any high-profile public event in the Baptist church would have been at most a Billy Graham-type revival meeting. Liturgy and ceremony were not central and were hardly even present, even though, in my youth and before the general cultural move to informality and the infusion of Southern Baptist manners into northern churches, Baptist services were still quite formal. Too much liturgy and ceremony was seen as popish. In the weeks while we were still just rehearsing the anthems, I was struck at how much the music was patterned on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, including Hubert Parry’s grandiose anthem, I Was Glad When They Said on to Me, a hymn sung to the tune of Jerusalem (also Parry's), the Widor Toccata as an organ postlude, etc. etc. It made me very apprehensive that the whole would turn into one big spectacle - indeed be only a spectacle.

But the ‘vibes’, to use an expression from an earlier age, were in my opinion all positive. There was certainly a lot of formality. But Americans can imbue even formality with a certain zing of informality that is very refreshing. It was a quite joyous event, in fact, despite all the pomp. The sermon, by the retired Chief Chaplain of the U.S. Navy and now Chaplain to the U.S. Senate, was all a big hit.

If you want to see what I mean, watch the video at http://pecf.cathedral.org/cathedral/. And if you really want to get a view of some key participants (i.e., Kathleen, my daughter Antonia next to her and yours truly a row behind), go to about 00.24.18 or 02.27.06. You can spot my son William (dark hair with a blond streak over the forehead) at 02.10.39 or 02.23.38. Jim Blackwell is a row ahead of him and somewhat to the William’s left.). The service lasted nearly three hours.