Week One – Wading into the waters!

After  a glorious Sunday (8/4) at Princeton Theological Seminary with the Montreal Boys Choir Course (see blog entry of 8/11) , Susan and I spent Monday continuing to bring order out of the chaos that currently is our home. Our home in the Hiltonia section of Trenton is a lovely 3 bedroom Colonial home that is perfect for us and has room for our children and grandchildren when they visit. There is a large family room in the back of the house that overlooks what, by our standards, is a huge backyard.  We’re looking forward to watching the seasons change through these windows.  Over our 18 years in Florida we have missed the seasons.  

There were minor glitches in our move.  The refrigerator in the house didn’t work, so we spent our first week eating all meals out.  They now know us well at the Two Peter’s Diner on North Olden! 

View from our family room

Tuesday, August 6 was my first official day at 808 W. State Street.   Before going to the office however, I joined a group of citizens concerned about the state of things in Trenton, who meet for breakfast every Tuesday morning at The Sunshine Luncheonette on Warren Street.   I was told it was a smaller group than usual (only three were present), but they helped give me a sense of things in this struggling city from their perspective which I found helpful.  Needless to say, with a Mayor under indictment on charges of corruption, a Governor and State Legislature that refuse to work with that Mayor because of his indictment, things are very dysfunctional in Trenton which, in 2013, is on the verge of seeing a record homicide rate.   If there ever was a time for concerned citizens to speak out, this is it!

 I arrived at the office just before 9:00 A.M. and was warmly welcomed by staff.   It was not long before everyone gathered for Morning Prayer in the small conference room.   This was followed by some catching up with one another.  Bishop Councell had just returned from vacation, so there were stories to hear about his time in Colorado.  

 Mary Ann Rhoads, Executive Assistant to the Bishop,  had kept Bishop Councell's and my calendars clear for the first few days.  This allowed us time to meet and time for me to be brought up to speed on life in the diocese and gain some insight about the parishes.   We were joined by Canon to the Ordinary, John Sosnowski, Chief Financial Officer, Phyllis Jones and Canon for Transitions, Cecilia Alavarez as we began a parish by parish review.   I also began to meet with staff one-on-one to begin building my relationship with them and to hear from them what their hopes and expectations are for me as bishop and what they feel is vital in the life of the Diocese of New Jersey.   I am most impressed by diocesan staff and feel they are a great gift to us all.  I am sorry that Canon Cynthia McFarland has not been able to be with us and is stepping down from her responsibilities as Canon for Communications for medical reasons.  We are all keeping her in our prayers.   She will continue to serve as Archivist and Historian which is a blessing to us all.

On Thursday, August 8, I had lunch with Dean Renè John.  There was a brief time when our paths crossed in the Diocese of Long Island, but we did not really know each other.  We began to build a relationship during the walk-abouts.  Now we are becoming friends as we figure out how we will work together both through the ministry of Trinity Cathedral and in the wider community of Trenton.  I am most grateful for his ministry and insights and look forward to serving with him.   He shared with me that he and his lovely wife Andrea would be away that weekend so that Andrea would receive her degree from Virginia College, a major accomplishment!  Congratulations, Andrea!!

Thursday afternoon, I also met with Canon Linda Moeller who is now the “point person” organizing the Consecration which is scheduled to take place on November 2. We have been unable to do very much about this because the consent process needed to be completed.  Having now received word that all the necessary consents have been received, it is full steam ahead.   Needless to say, there is a great deal to do between now and then.   Linda’s tremendous organizational skills will be put to good use.  Thanks, Linda!

On Sunday, we worshipped at the Church of the Atonement under the leadership of The Rev. Jayne Oasin, a longtime friend with whom I served on the Anti-Racism Committee of the Episcopal Church.   Susan and I are very much enjoying driving to different parts of the diocese and discovering new places and new people.  The Church of the Atonement is a small jewel of a church.  It is immaculately kept and we received a warm welcome from Jayne and the members of the parish.  Jayne preached an excellent sermon on faith and fear using the idea of Abraham being called to go to a place he did not know as her point of departure.  Susan and I can identify with that.  

with The Rev. Jayne Oasin and Brandon Jones 

All in all, my first week was a time to start building relationship and to begin learning about this large diocese and its enormous challenges.  It feels great to be on the ground after months of anticipation and to begin wading into the waters!

The Spirit’s Language of Love - Sermon preached at the closing Eucharist of the Montreal Boys Choir Course

The Montreal Boys’ Choir Course – The Miller Chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Acts 2: 1- 11; Ps. 104; Romans  8:14 – 16; John 14:8-27

Preacher:  The Rev. Canon William (Chip) Stokes, Bishop-Elect of New Jersey

The Spirit’s Language of Love

Send forth your Spirit, Lord, and renew the face of the earth….

                                                                       

What a great privilege it is for me to be with you this morning and to have the honor of being your celebrant and guest preacher.  I am grateful to Canon Rob Picken, to Larry Tremskey and the other organizers of this week’s events for the invitation to be with you. 

I have a lifelong association with the Diocese of Long Island.  Canon Picken was a fifth grader at Grace Church and Day School in Massapequa, Long Island, when I served as Curate and School Chaplain more than 20 years ago.  He was an excellent, well-behaved student and very engaged in religion class.  Given his propensity to argue theology and politics with me in grades five through eight, I felt confident that God would likely call him to the priesthood one day and voila! It is a great joy to be serving at the altar with him.

Today’s service is, quite literally, my first official act as the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of New Jersey, so, on behalf of the people of the Diocese of New Jersey, welcome.  I can’t think of a more special or personally meaningful way for me to begin my work in this part of God’s dominion than joining with outstanding musicians, young and old, to praise God in joyful song, celebrating the work and gifts of the Holy Spirit.  God is good.  How blessed we are. 

I am a trained choral musician.  That’s what makes this so personally meaningful for me.   From 1967 to 1970, I had the great good fortune and privilege of attending St. Thomas Choir School in New York City.   It’s the only Church-related boarding Choir School left in the country.  I can’t adequately express to you how influential attending St. Thomas and singing in that remarkable choir was.  That experience still influences me, continues to be a vital part of my faith.   Whenever I am asked to say something about my prayer life, I always state, quite truthfully, that the music of the church, the hymns in particular, are the principle means by which I pray. 

By the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, there is music in my soul.  This music, these songs, hymns, psalms and anthems play a continuous stream of prayer and praise in my mind and heart, appropriate to my spiritual state at any given moment – songs of joy, songs of fear, songs of sadness, songs of happiness.  The music of the Church is my spiritual treasure trove, a phenomenal resource that goes with me wherever I am…It is an almost uncanny and unfathomable thing.  

I feel confident that music is a primary language of the Holy Spirit.  When people make music together, it is difficult for enmity to take place.  Music is the language of love.  It crosses every ethnic, national and social boundary.  It is the universal language of God’s love for us and of our love for God.

I have been blessed in singing God’s love all my life and through the music of the Church, not only hearing, but also feeling within the depths of my soul, God’s love for me.  So, my heart overflows.  This is why I am so glad to be with you today, singing, listening to God’s love songs and feeling God’s love and grace pour abundantly over us all.  I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to begin my ministry in New Jersey!

St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest of the so-called Church Father’s and certainly a bedrock figure of Western Theological thought once wrote, “Singing is for lovers”[1] and it is, and especially for lovers of God.  St. Augustine is also reported to have said, “He who sings prays twice.”   It is an insightful observation, although at least one source I know of has pointed out that the Latin form of the saying is actually “"Qui bene cantat bis orat,"  that is, “He who sings well prays twice.”[2] 

It’s an interesting qualification. Personally,  I believe God hears the sounds that proceed out of the mouths of any of the faithful, skilled or not, as the music of love and delights in these sounds.  Still, there is much to be said for singing well. 

I thoroughly enjoyed stopping by The Lawrenceville School this past Thursday and observing some of the rehearsals of both the trebles and the adults.  I thoroughly appreciated the painstaking attention and care shown by two brilliant musicians, Simon Lole with the trebles and Patrick Wedd with the adults. It transported me back to rigorous choir rehearsals of my youth and my adulthood. 

When I began my experience at St. Thomas Choir School in 1967 as a 10 year-old fifth grader, I had no idea that this love of God would claim me so deeply.   In fact, when I started at St. Thomas Choir School, I was incredibly homesick and wondered why I had told my mother I wanted to attend.  Remember it was a boarding school.  There were only fifty students in the whole school and we were all required to live at the school.  At that time, it was located on 55^th Street between 6^th and 7^th Avenue in New York City.  The student body was made up of boys from all over.  I had schoolmates from as far away as Hong Kong, California and Texas.  My home was less 30 blocks away, on 83^rd street.  Still, it might as well have been 3000 miles. 

My dad’s birthday fell on September 17^th.   I was usually part of the family celebration.  But there I was that first year, at St. Thomas Choir School.  The school had a rule that there was to be no contact with family during the first month.  This was to get us used to living apart from home.  Still, it was my dad’s birthday.  If I couldn’t be with him, at least I wanted to call him on the phone and wish him a happy birthday. I asked the headmaster if I could do that.  He said yes, and that evening, I went to his apartment and he let me call my dad.

“Hhhhiii dad…I called to wiii…sh you a…a….happy birthday” I mumbled though my sobs.  It was awful.   And it didn’t go away quickly.  Pretty soon, November came and all of the hustle and bustle that goes with that holiday season in New York…Then Advent and Christmas…Wow!  I wasn’t going to be home on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning.   We had to stay at the school in order to sing the full schedule of Christmas services, including spending Christmas Eve at school after the 11:00 PM service ended.  I would wake up on Christmas Day not in my home with my family, ready to tear into packages and presents.  I would be at St. Thomas Choir School getting ready for church!

  Anticipating how dreadful all that would be, I was pretty miserable in the days leading up to Christmas.  I felt incredibly sad and terribly homesick.  The school had wonderful rituals and traditions to make the time festive for us, still not being home that first Christmas was awfully difficult….But then Christmas Eve came.   At 4:00 PM, we sang Benjamin Britten’s masterful Ceremony of Carols. It made me feel a little better.

At precisely 11:00 PM, I processed into the astonishingly beautiful sanctuary of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue.  The church was decked out in stunning evergreens.  I was one of 70 choristers, the Choir of Men and Boys, singing “O Come all ye faithful” in a church packed to the rafters with worshippers….It captured me. 

In that moment, in the singing of that hymn, Adeste Fidelis, with the magnificent organ filling that building with glorious sound, I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world…At that moment, on that Christmas Eve, God’s Spirit took hold of me and my life and has never let go….I cried “Abba, Father” in song, and received in a way I had never known before the Spirit of adoption as Christ’s own (cf. Rom. 8:14).  It was a conversion experience, one of several in my life…

I believe our growth in faith is a life-long process involving many conversion experiences…In that moment in St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, I was profoundly aware of God’s love for me, of God’s love for the world, and of the significance of the birth of the Christ child who was born for me, born for us all, calling us, beckoning us, into God’s marvelous light.  And so I sang, I soared with the descant.  The Holy Spirit took hold of me, as it took hold of those first apostles at Pentecost, and I worshipped and sang of God’s deeds of power (cf. Acts 2:1-11).   And I have loved Christ and loved Christ’s Church ever since. My heart was ready.[3]

In a wonderful little book titled The Spirit of the Liturgy, former Pope Benedict XVI observed, “Yes, singing, the surpassing of ordinary speech is a ‘pnuematic” event.  Church music comes into being as a “charism,”  a gift of the Spirit.  It is the true glossolalia, the tongue that comes from the Holy Spirit.  It is above all in church music that the “sober inebriation” of faith takes place – an inebriation surpassing all the possibilities of mere rationality.”[4] 

So I give thanks this day, my first official day as the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of New Jersey.  I give thanks for the “pneumatic” experience of this day…for the gift of your voices and the talents of the choral directors and musicians who have allowed you to sing well and thereby contribute to our “sober inebriation”….I give thanks for the charisms abundantly on display providing glorious evidence that the true glossolalia, the tongues of the Spirit have come again, like wind and fire, into this place, making it alive, full of the breath, the pnuema of God. …It is a new Pentecost, thanks be to God. 

O for a thousand tongues to sing

my dear redeemer’s praise

The glories of my God and King,

the triumphs of his grace

Glory to God and praise and love

be now and ever given

By saints below and saints above

The Church in earth and heaven.[5]

May God’s Spirit take hold of each and every one of you, fill you anew with the light and love of Christ…May you always  be inebriated with God’s Spirit and lift your voices in glorious love songs to the one who gave himself for us, Christ Jesus,  the lover of us all. 

---

[1]     See Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (Pope Benedict XVI) The Spirit of the Liturgy  translated by John Saward  Part Three, Chapter 2 “Music and Liturgy” (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2000) Kindle E-Book locations 1604 - 7

[2]     See “St. Augustine – He who sings prays twice”  - Fr. Z’s Blog (Fr. John Zuhlsdorf), Entry of February 20, 2006 found at http://wdtprs.com/blog/2006/02/st-augustine-he-who-sings-prays-twice/

[3] The current motto of St. Thomas Choir School is “O God, ny heart is ready”.   In 1967 it was Cantate Domino  - “Sing to the Lord a New Song” from the Latin opening verses of Psalms 96 and 98.

[4]     Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (Pope Benedict XVI) The Spirit of the Liturgy  translated by John Saward  Part Three, Chapter 2 “Music and Liturgy” (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2000) Kindle E-Book locations 1578 - 81

[5] Wesley Charles “Of for a thousand tongues to sing” - Hymnal 1982 (New York:  Church Hymnal Corporation, 1982), Hymn #493.

First Sunday in New Jersey – Songs of wonder, love and praise! The Montreal Boy’s Choir Camp

Soon after the New Jersey Episcopal election, I received a call from Canon Rob Picken of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York in the Diocese of Long Island.   It was good to hear from him.  He was a former student.  Rob was a fifth-grader at Grace Day School in Massapequa, New York when I was the School Chaplain there.   Over the past few years, Rob had become involved with the renowned Montreal Boys’ Choir Course.  Rob called to ask if I would be willing to be the preacher and celebrant at the closing Eucharist of the 2013 program.

With Canon Rob Picken

The Montreal Boys’ Choir Course was begun in 1960, when four Anglican parishes in Montreal determined to bring together outstanding choral musicians from Canada and the United States (and now from Great Britain) “for a week of singing, sports, creative activities, and worship.”  (See http://www.mbccusa.com)  While, historically, the course had been held in Montreal, circumstances determined that the 2013 MBCC would be held in the United States.   The course itself was to be hosted at the Lawrenceville School. Participants came from 22 different churches including All Saints Ashmont Parish, Dorchester, MA; Cathedral of All Saints, Albany, NY; Cathederal of the Incarnation, Garden City, NY; Christ Church Cathedral, Lexington, KY; Grace Church on-the-Hill, Ontario; Metropolitan Boys Choir, Minneapolis, MN; St. Mary’s, Swanage, UK; St. Thomas Choir School, New York, St. Paul’s K-Street, Washington, Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston and several others.  The closing Eucharist would take place on August 4, at The Miller Chapel of The Princeton Theological Seminary.    I was thrilled to accept!  Being a trained choral musician, having attended St. Thomas Choir School in New York as a boy, I felt this would be a glorious and personally meaningful way for me to celebrate my first Sunday and kick-off my ministry in the Diocese of New Jersey. 

 On Thursday, August 1, Susan and I made the short drive from Trenton to the Lawrenceville School to observe some of the MBCC rehearsals.  There were two sessions.  A group of about 40 treble boys was rehearsing under the direction of Simon Lole.  Simon is a major figure in England.  Trained as a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, he was educated at the Guildhall School of Music and King’s College, London University and served as Organist and Music Director at Sheffield Cathedral and at Salisbury Cathedral. He also taught at Jesus College, Cambridge.  A noted composer, today, Simon is a recognized figure in classical-crossover music, appearing regularly on BBC and recording regularly with major international record labels.  It was a great joy to watch Simon rehearse the trebles.  He was meticulous, but always caring and enthusiastic.  Short phrases were repeated until they were perfect.

The adult men and women rehearsed separately under the direction of Patrick Wedd, another enormously talented and gracious man, who is the Director of Music at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal.  The sounds were magnificent.  I couldn’t wait to see how it would all come together when this choir of over 70 people joined forces for the closing Eucharist on Sunday morning and for Evensong on Sunday afternoon.  

 The theme and focus of this year’s MBCC was “the Holy Spirit.”  The repertoire included:

 

J.S. Bach  - Der Geist hilft (Carus edition).

With choristers from St. Thomas Choir School

Francis Jackson - Evening Service in G

Gabriel Jackson -Preces & Responses (Edinburgh)   

Jonathan Dove - Missa Brevis

Gerald Near - Spiritus Domini

Grayston Ives – Listen, Sweet Dove

It was a great privilege to be the preacher and celebrant for this incredible music event. Miller Chapel was filled with ethereal sound.  I was most honored to welcome the entire gathering on behalf of the people of the Diocese of New Jersey..  For this to be my first official act as the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of New Jersey was a grace-filed and wondrous thing for me, for which I am deeply thankful to God.  Susan and I stayed for lunch and Evensong.  I even got to meet three boys from my alma mater St. Thomas Choir School.  It was a glorious first Sunday as Bishop-elect of New Jersey!

The text of my sermon which tells of my own experience as a choirboy at St. Thomas Choir School, is available as a separate blog entry.