Finding God in London

Adeste Fideles! Christmas Down The Ages; Emma Kirkby; The Westminster Abbey Choir; Martin Neary, conducting

I first went to London in 1991 while chaperoning the group of high school age students that formed a concert choir and symphonic band. I don’t recall where the band played. The choir provided special music on Sunday morning during 11 AM Worship at John Wesley’s Chapel, mere steps away from The City of London proper. The choir sang from the upper gallery. I accompanied from the piano down on the main floor and sat with the organist during the service. At one point I noticed a large bandage on the thumb of his right hand. I don’t think it stopped his hands at all from doing their liturgical dance on the keyboard of their 1891 pipe organ. What did you do to your thumb? “Oh. Occupational hazard, don’t you see.” No, I guess I don’t. Do you mean you maimed yourself while practicing the organ? “Ah! No. I also serve as the gardener, and we have a frightfully barbarous rose bush that guards the cloisters out back.”

Following church, and after wolfing down some lunch, the group had an afternoon bus trip in store, hitting up St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, the smallest building in London, the British Museum, and the area of London terrorized in 1888 by the notorious Jack the Ripper. Dr. C., however, had made a special request, during our lunch break, that when we stop to see Westminster Abbey, we do so during Evensong. I liked this request.

We only had three days in this city, and most of our stops on our bus tour consisted of us getting out of the bus and having different features pointed out. We never really got to tour anyplace substantial and substantially. We more than likely would have stopped at Westminster Abbey for just a few moments to receive a quick history while admiring the gothic structure from outside. In this case, though, we could walk inside this living piece of Anglican history, every bit as much a British museum as the British Museum, and worship God in a place where Christians have met, and the pageantry of English history has played itself out, for nearly one thousand years. Since Christmas Day in 1066, when William the Conqueror had himself crowned the King of England, every British monarch has presented him or herself for coronation in this bastion of Anglican Christianity.

I don’t know how much the young travelers got out of the service, but I sat mesmerized by the learned preaching, the subdued yet reverent recitation of scripture, and the glorious music from the Choir of Westminster Abbey. My colleagues and I later shared this impression: In a country that lies many thousand miles from our own, whose national history has stood apart from our's for more than two hundred years, in one of the largest cities of the world, whose international flavor dictates a more secular, a larger and more culturally encompassing worldview, in a structure that contains burial places of and memorials to notable and celebrated citizens of the United Kingdom, the surreality of it all stood aside long enough for all of us in this place, American and Britton alike, to share in the same God, the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit that we worship in our own churches, wherever they may be.

In a place that so soon may boast of a millennium of virtually continuous worship, the Choir of Westminster Abbey on “Adeste Fideles! Christmas Down The Ages” displays a proclivity for Christmas music as worshippers would have sung it at different times in its illustrious history. Leaving behind the grand arrangements, the polish and gloss of extravagance, and the really big “Joy To The World”s, the choir, its guests and soloists bring their trademark excellence to a more intimate, a more potent because of its compact presentation, and certainly a more acoustic observance of the coming of Christ.

Credits: To those who travel the world and who seek the familiar God they know and find it amidst all that deviates from the customary, the routine, the ordinary and the run-of-the-mill.