O, What a Night!
By John McCandlish Phillips
(This was first published in the Nov/Dec 1976 issue of LOGOS JOURNAL a division of WORD, Inc.)
I live only yards beyond the slanting shadows of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which sits grandly atop a bluff on Morningside Heights in Manhattan, overlooking Harlem’s tenement rooftops.
The massive stones of what was to become the largest Protestant cathedral in the world were first laid in 1892 on a lot that was deliberately chosen next to Columbia University, so that a visible testimony to the living God would loom before the members of that great and venerable university (founded, with due and proper loyalty to British royalty, as The King’s College in early colonial days).
Through the decades, clergymen have sounded the transcendent truths of the Scriptures under the mighty arches of the Cathedral Church of St. John. The treasures of the Book of Common Prayer and of the Hymnal have stood as a warrant that services would proclaim changeless truths.
In recent years the Cathedral (facing deficits that came to $500,000 in one annual tally) has been going through an identity crisis.
There are a good many symptoms of that, none more striking than the festival of spicy religious exotica held there just a year ago in the form of. a “Cosmic Mass.” Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Moslems, and a rich assortment of mystics, engaged in a rather gaudy act of celebration, affirming the “unity of all religions.” Time magazine described it, quite aptly, as a “Mish-Mass.”
A few months earlier, white-robed members of the Oomoto Foundation, a monotheistic Japanese religious community, set up a special altar in the Cathedral and “offered to God the fruits of the earth and sea”—repeating the error of Cain and compounding it.
The place was, of course, the principal launching site for the amazing ecclesiastical rollercoaster ride of the late James A. Pike (unbeliever-turned-believer-turned bishop-turned spiritualist) in the 1950s. Lately, members of the Sufi Order, an offshoot of Islam, have whirled through their trance-like dances in the Cathedral, and instruction in T’ai Chi Ch’uan (including the martial arts and Chinese acupuncture massage) is regularly conducted there.
All Things to All People
So it is that the Cathedral, eager to please and troubled by formidable deficits, has, pursued adventures in syncretism, proclaiming the universal brotherhood of man, the essential oneness of world religions and other things that spring readily from the sensitive and questing human spirit unshaped—and unprotected—by a vigorous belief in the full authority of the Holy Scriptures. But there was a night—what a night!—when the vaults of the Cathedral resounded with the praise of God and of his Son, Jesus; a night when the great organ, with its 8,035 pipes, thundered out for nearly an hour the grandest hymns of the evangelical faith; a night when hundreds of voices were raised together in spontaneous song and worship, when the stones of the cathedral echoed the majestic hallelujahs of a grateful people.
O, what a night!
This, after all, is exactly what a cathedral is for—worship! Not just a program of worship, or a ritual called worship, but the thing itself. (How many of what are called Services of Worship have room in them for every-thing but worship? One can see ushers running, their faces appalled, carnations wilting, to escort out of a “service of worship” a person caught in an act of worship). The Cathedral became the setting that night for what was announced as—
A SERVICE OF WITNESS
TO THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST
IN THE POWER OF HIS HOLY SPIRIT
arranged by The Episcopal Charismatic Fellowship of New York and the ministers of eight Episcopal churches in the area.
The great 18-foot-high doors were swung open early and people came streaming up the steps, passing under letters carved in stone above the entry portal—affirming, on the face of all that grandeur, the fragility of life and its better promise: “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Moving inside, they saw the awe-some march of gray granite columns and arches leading more than 600 feet through the narthex and nave to the great choir, the high altar and the ring of chapels beyond it. You can gain some idea of the scale by this: The great column near the entrance is actually a configuration of twenty columns and, just to walk around it, a man close to six and one-half feet tall, as I am, must take thirty-six full-stride steps.
Hundreds gathered in the Cathedral that night. When the first notes of a song of praise arose in a certain corner, others here and there would strand their voices with it until the whole congregation took it up and sent it skyward! Two gifted men—not song leaders but true choral conductors moving in the Spirit—walked among the throng of worshippers, using gestures of great beauty to develop an authentic note of praise into a whole anthem of praise.
What A Night
It seemed as though they were able to take the very sound into their hands and into their arms and shape it like a work of sculpture.
O, what a night it was! If the Cathedral had been built only for that night, it would not have been wasted. In those hours the Cathedral was used to the fullest for its highest purpose, to declare the glory of God in no uncertain voice.
My heart knew that night, as surely as it had ever known, that God is with his people, tabernacling with them, mindful of their city.
I remembered that six years earlier, a friend of mine named Hannah Lowe, who is a missionary of long service in South America and who walks in the Spirit, strolled by the Cathedral one day and said when she had passed it, “The Lord is going to move in that Cathedral. Thousands will come because of it.” She does not speak lightly in such matters ever, so I remembered her words.
When the remarkable service was held she was in South America, so I wrote to her, telling of it with some care. Her answer was, “This is only the beginning of what the Lord is going to do. There will be much more. More healings, much joy in the Lord….” There were testimonies that night by young people who had been released from the power of drug addiction by the greater power of Christ.
An ecclesiastical dignitary, robed in the linens of his office, observed the proceeding from the altar area. He lifted his arms at one point and said, “Praise the Lord.” That it was not his custom was clear, but in the lovely torrents of that night’s outpouring of adoration, he found the liberty to do so.
A bishop from the West who had been baptized in the Holy Spirit—the Right Reverend William C. Frey of Colorado—confessed, as he began the sermon, that he had not known what to expect when he accepted the invitation—”Perhaps,” as he put it, he would find “half a dozen oddball Jesus freaks rattling around in this vast place.”
The bishop spoke cogently, and with a fine and powerful directness, and his words went into the ears of the hundreds of men and women and young people gathered before him.
There were prophecies—as clearly breathed by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as any I have heard—that told of God’s great love for the people of New York, of his design to pour out his Spirit as water upon a desert and, by it, to bring many to a knowledge of his Son. There was a flowing quality to the words and, in them, there was a suggestion of that Voice that is as the sound of many waters.
Wisely, the ministers did not open this aspect of the service to the whole congregation. Instead, they had gathered a circle of more than a dozen individuals, all known for their character as well as the charismata, near the front of the altar. From this previously selected group, several rose to speak prophetically.
The evening was a triumph of Episcopal dignity and order and charisma-tic liberty and power. What a magnificent compound, what a setting, and—O, what a night!
A series of seven consecutive chapels runs in a semicircle around the choir and the altar, called the Chapels of the Tongues, a symbol of the Cathedral’s purpose as a house of prayer for all people.
That night, as the service ended, the people were invited to move to St. Ansgar’s Chapel for dedication to Jesus Christ or rededication to him, to St. James Chapel for the ministry of healing, and to the high altar for the ministry of the infilling of the Holy Spirit. The ways in which lives were touched and altered in the hour that followed can only be surmised.
As I walked out of the Cathedral that night, with a heart lifted in gladness, I felt certain that this was just a marvelous sampler, the forerunner of many such evenings ahead. Such truly empowered services, held in a place where 10,000 can easily gather, are what a troubled city cannot do without, for New York is a city of needs so great that only God can meet them.
They would be back in a month, I told myself, and then, as the fame of the services increases, they will hold them every week. I still cannot believe that so far that service has been the only one. Two full years have passed. Maybe they will yet return—these awakened and gifted people—and do so again and again, until the Cathedral is filled with people and with praise, and the overflow spills into the streets of the remarkable village in which the Cathedral sits, too often nearly empty. Waiting.
(This was first published in the Nov/Dec 1976 issue of LOGOS JOURNAL a division of WORD, Inc.)