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During our two months in NYC, we visited several places of worship. No, we have not suddenly found religion, but since we visited Buddhist temples while in southeast Asia and Hindu temples while in India, why not Christian and Jewish houses of worship in the U.S.?

We started our exploration in a very large Jewish synagogue on the upper east side. Walking by one day on our way from Central Park to home, we saw a sign for a lecture to be given by Bernard Lewis a very famous emeritus professor of Middle Eastern Studies from London who has just written a book on Judeo-Islamic relations.  We had hoped for something very insightful on the current state of affairs in the Middle East in which this very learned man would draw on his years of experience in the history of the region. Sadly we found his talk restricted its scope to pre-18th century affairs and was much too light to be satisfying. He barely touched the surface of his topic — perhaps as much as can be expected given his great age, but it was a great disappointment after the amazing introduction he was given.  We don’t know his work so can’t judge whether it was deserved in general, but in this case we were not very favorably impressed. What was impressive was the size of the audience, which must have numbered in the thousands.

We attended another talk at another upper east side temple called called Kehilath Jeshurun. This time it was the speaker rather than the topic that attracted us to what we later learned was a memorial lecture for a member of the synagogue. The speaker was Charles Krauthammer, a well-known conservative columnist and rather a favorite of ours.  Our first surprise was to learn that he has some kind of illness, probably multiple sclerosis, that keeps him confined to a wheelchair and unable to lift a glass to take a drink — a straw solves that problem.  But his mind is not at all impaired and he gave a very interesting talk about the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accords and why in his opinion they had been a mistake for Israel.

And since it is always considered auspicious to do things in threes, we went to a third synagogue for yet another talk, this time on Kristallnacht, by the man who wrote the screenplay for Blazing Saddles (I forget his name).  Sadly, it too was a bit of a disapointment.  Rather than talking about the event itself, the speaker talked about the effects on children of having parents who had fled Nazi Germany because of Kristallnacht. Jan found it rather self-serving and whining.  Much more interesting was the congregation made up largely of German Jewish immigrants, a majority of whom it seemed were in their seventies and eighties.  Jan got a kick out of hearing them speak German to one another. With such an aging congregation, one wonders what the future holds for this synagogue, squeezed like a sardine in a can into a block of 66th Street East. The property itself is certainly valuable.  How much longer one wonders can it survive as a going concern with such a lopsided age distribution?  It is possible of course that the Friday evening service, especially one celebrating such a central event in their lives, is particularly attractive to the elderly congregants.  Perhaps Saturday morning they attract a younger crowd.

The Kristallnatch lecture was part of a regular Sabbath Eve Service, but it was not the only such service we attended.  Towards the end of our stay we went to another service this time on the upper west side on 86th and Broadway to a very different kind of service.  Aimed at young people, and run by two Sephardi Rabbis from South America, it was just such a different affair.  In the German congregation, the service was stiff and formal, with a choir hidden behind a screen, carrying most of the burden of the singing. There was audience participation, but it was somewhat restrained in nature. In the South American, it was relaxed and joyous.  All the songs and chants were done in a modern, salsa-type beat and the general air was one really of celebration with people clapping to the beat as they sang along. In fact, at one point in the service, lots of people jumped up out of their seats and started dancing a hora-like dance around the room.  There was no choir, per se, but the two rabbis had lovely voices and they were ably assisted by a couple playing music and singing with them.

As a true bi-cultural couple, we did not ignore the other half of our heritage, the Christian one.  On one of our walks across town we happened to walk by the St. Thomas Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue, which our friend Sylvia Kuzmak had wanted to visit when we were on 5th Avenue on Columbus Day.  At that time it was closed, but when we saw it a second time, we decided to come for Sunday morning services which we did.  The service was a bit surprising in that it was what in England we would call a high-church service.  I had always associated Episcopalians with Presbyterians, who being of Scottish stock are down-to-earth and rather informal in their worship practices.  At St. Thomas’s, however, the service was much more elaborate and much more like a Catholic service.  Those who wished could take communion by filing up to the front of the church and then back to their seats. Nobody looked askance at those like us who didn’t partake.

Later, we took a tour of the church and were told that the church was frequented largely by immigrants from England and that they had shifted the emphasis towards high-church practices such as barring women priests fairly recently. It brought to mind the parish church in Darlington closest to our house there which is also a “high-church” congregation that is steadfastly opposed to women being ordained.

The church of St. Thomas is however a lovely church, built in the 20th century but in the gothic style and rather beautifully so. It occupies a corner plot on 5th Avenue and 53rd Street and contains a very beautiful carved marble balustrade, pulpit, and altar back drop. We highly recommend a visit to the Church if you have the time.

Very different and very American was the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, a famous tourist destination, where we attended Sunday morning service with our friends Moshe and Cristhiane.  We had arranged to meet Moshe and Cris outside the church at 10:45 for an 11 a.m. service, but had not realized how different Sunday bus service is from normal, were late catching a bus and didn’t get to Harlem until almost 11:15.  Luckily we had our cellphone with us and managed after a couple of missed calls to get hold of Moshe and Cris and learned that they too had set off a little late and had just arrived and were waiting for us — in line!  This was the first time we had had to stand in line to get into a church service.  And when we found the line we were amazed at the length of the line and the number of people in it, of all nationalities, wanting to attend a church service. The members of the congregtion did not have to line up of course, they went in a different entrance than us tourists. At first, Jan, the resident pessimist, was convinced that there would not be enough room for us, but just before 11:30 the line started to move. We, the tourists, were only being seated once the regular congregants had found their seats.  The service had in fact already started by the time we entered the building and climbed the stairs to one of the balcony entrances.  Mirabile dictu, there was space for all and we found ourselves seated separately from Moshe and Cris and sandwiched between two pairs of black ladies all in their Sunday finery, smart hats and all.

The service was led by Calvin Butts, a well-known political as well as religious leader in New York, whom we were interested to see in real life. The service was both more formal than our BJ service on the upper west side and less formal than any of the other Christian services.  The atmosphere was generally one of warmth and family-feeling. Our pew-mates greeted us in a most friendly fashion when we arrived, when we left, and at the time when the Reverend Butts acknowledged all of the visitors and asked them to stand.

The church building itself reminded Jan very much of the Methodist church she attended as a young girl in Darlington that was torn down in the 1960’s because it was to expensive to run.  It was semi-circular in plan with a deep balcony running around the semi-circle.  We were seated in the center portion of that balcony and so had an unobscured view of the lectern wher Rev. Butts presided and of the choir, in a special balcony area behind the podium. There was no altar as such, just a table in front of the podium that was used to light Sabbath candles at one point during the service (another interesting touch not seen in any other Christian church service we have ever attended).

As with the other services, communion was offered, but in a much different way because of the logistics of the balcony.  Instead of the congregation going to the bread and wine, the bread and wine came to them.  The same white-gloved ushers who had supervised our seating at the beginning of the service began by distributing wafers to all who wished to take communion and then passed around trays with tiny plastic glasses of wine.  When all had been distributed, Rev. Butts led the congregation in communion.

Much more of the service was taken up with community and administrative affairs than at any of the other services we attended.  Much was made of members of the congregation who had succeeded in some special way.  Those who were sick were remembered by name, as were those who had recently died.  And finally, about thirty new members were called to the front, introduced to the congregation, and welcomed.

Although we have both visited New York many times over the 20 years we lived in New Jersey, there were three things we had never done.  One was to visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, another was to attend a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and a third was to visit Riverside Church.  On this visit we remedied all of these lacunas.

On a visit to Columbia University to attend a talk by Alain Juppe, the former Prime Minister of France and supporter (and would-be successor) of President Jacques Chirac, we took out an hour to walk up the road to the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine for the first time.  The building, begun at the beginning of the century and officially completed only a decade ago, is very impressive in its size and scale, but on the whole, we found it too big, too impersonal, too vast. Perhaps we would have a different reaction were we actually to attend a service.  That must be for our next stay in New York.

What we did not expect, was to find the Cathedral serving as a museum venue for a wonderful exhibit of Spanish religious art, sculpture, and artifacts.  We spent more than an hour in the exhibit and were very impressed with the quality of the pieces and the way in which they were displayed in the chapel areas off the circulambulatory around the back of the Cathedral’s choir. 

We left our visit to St. Patrick’s, the Catholic Cathedral of the city to our last Sunday morning.  We found the service times on the web and chose a 9:30 service, arriving ten minutes early after a brisk walk in the cool morning air from our apartment.  The first thing that struck us was how beautiful the church looked, with all the lights turned on and setting off the church’s lovely gothic architecture.  The service was a little harder to follow than the Episcopalian one had been, with more chant-reponses, and kneeling required at various points in the service that even with the prayer book we could not quite follow. That made us feel a little awkward, as did the fact that once again we did not join the majority in filing up to the front for communion, but that feeling was only highlighted when we read the admonishment in the service handout to those not of the Catholic faith to please not take Communion.  Somehow it was an unfriendly statement.  We NEVER  take Communion anyway because we don’t believe, but for those Christians of other denominations who do, it is rather a slap in the face to be told that even as a believer you are not welcome to take communion here. 

Gerry visited Riverside Church...

Did our experiences here bring us any closer to a belief in God?  No.  But if I did believe, I think I would share my time between St. Thomas’s for the beauty of its building, BJ for its joie de vivre, and Abyssinian Baptist Church for its strong sense of community.