A Solid Sacred Space

Since I was 13, a church on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street in New York City has been a place where, through the years, I keep returning. Like the stone columns and arches that hold up the ceiling 95 feet from the floor, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue stands like a rock of unchangeable certainty in the forty-three years since I've poked my curious eyes into the front doors.

I am not a member of St. Thomas, nor am I ever likely to become one. I do not even attend the church on a regular basis. Yet it has become for me a symbol of the greater reality to which it points and for which it was dedicated. Completed in 1913, this work of architect Bertram Goodhue boasts with justification as being one of the great architectural monuments in the country as it holds a position as both a National and New York City Landmark. By no means Goodhue's best work--he considered the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue and 66th St. his masterpiece--St. Thomas nevertheless cuts an elegant figure in midtown Manhattan where it holds its own against the monumental Cathedral of St. Patrick three blocks away. The church is also a relic of the Gilded Age when Vanderbilts married their daughters there in full view of New York high society. It now carries in its endowment the legacy of its Edith Wharton days, but holds in its pews tourists and gawkers, seekers and skeptics, believers who love great music and lovers of great music who don't believe, preppy Episcopalians in their Connecticut country club attire and Catholics who love to see their own liturgy done better than their own parishes do it, and just about everyone else. The shadows of its former fashionability linger in the white-gloved ushers, dressed in black, carrying on like attendants at a royal banquet. Its present reality intrudes when the worshipper in a "This Bud's for you!" T-shirt and shorts ascends the altar steps to receive Communion.

For me, St. Thomas is not about the members or people who attend its services. I cannot tell who is a member or not anyway. Neither is about its high brow history in old New York. The grand building, on the other hand, has drawn me to itself for all these years. The real appeal for me continues to be the liturgy attended by the boys' choir and a clergy who preserve Christian orthodoxy in its Anglican form. Worship at St. Thomas casts a transcendence no other church in the City has ever done for me. The solidity of the architecture, the other-worldliness of the music, the splendor of the vestments, the dignity of the language, and the whole shrouded in clouds of incense conspire to open a portal leading away from the stuff on Fifth Avenue to the Gates of Heaven. Never an instrument so ponderous and weighty as an old gothic church building with its medieval trappings could elevate my spirit beyond all weightlessness. Ultimately, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue isn't about an institution. It isn't about the Episcopal Church USA. Much less is it about its former position in New York society. It isn't about its music program. It isn't about its distinguished clergy. It isn't about its membership. It isn't about the landmarked building. It is about the One to whom St. Thomas once confessed, "My Lord and my God!"