Choral Evensong

Brian, John, and I just returned from the evening service at the Minster. As the contraband program with which I absconded after the service describes, "Evensong is the form of Evening Prayer that is distinctive to the Church of England and other Churches of the Anglican Communion. It includes elements from the medieval Latin evening services of Vespers and Compline, and has been largely unchanged since the first English-language Book of Common Prayer in 1549." For the two Sundays that I've been here, I'd heard the church bells ringing as a summons to this service, and so today we finally made it a priority to get ourselves there.

For me, it was a fabulous experience. The immense presence that the Minster has exerted on me while walking the streets in the city center or looking out my bedroom window is only all the more concentrated inside its immense walls and expanses of stained glass. The space beneath its high arched ceilings seems almost otherworldly, all that history and tradition floating upwards amongst the chatter of tourists passing through. The majority of tonight's hour-long service consisted of the choir singing (as my program again explains, "The cathedrals and other great churches of the Anglican Communion maintain a strong choral tradition..."), and although the abundance of Latin was somewhat inhibiting, I was able to sit tight and be truly edified by the music. Now, I'm no expert in choral music, but the music to me was incredibly powerful. Listening to the final echo of voices reverberate in the distant corners of the ceiling or watching the carved stone wrap around the sky-colored stained-glass windows allowed me to back out of my imminent, mobile, autonomous culture and receive something special. The history of the words being recited and the engraving on the wood beside my seat all became important to what was happening at that moment, what has happened in the past, and what could happen in the future. The happenings of the year 1549 became important in my mind, the young choir girl not quite keeping up with the music mattered immensely--even the flickering candles between the aisles seemed to signal something important. To have such potentially or typically trivial circumstances and objects be crucially involved in a church experience is exactly what I needed, at least for this evening.

Please forgive my baroque and over-dramatic language above, but the music tonight was quite nice indeed. And the echoes!