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Art led me to Christianity: I might not be able to recite the creed, but the story seized me. I got religion to participate in the liturgy
I got religion when I was 14, at Beaverbrook Music Camp. We were, most of us, instrumentalists"”I played the violin"”but all of us had to sing in Camp Chorus. Our major work, my first year at Beaverbrook, was the Schubert Mass in G"”a warhorse for amateur choirs and one of the sweetest masses in the classical literature. The Benedictus is a Viennese waltz.
In musicianship class we learnt about the music we were playing and singing. We studied the Mass as a musical form and got the English translation, with commentary. Having been brought up unchurched, this was the closest I ever got to religious training. But it was more than enough: I fell in love with the church.
Six years later I was baptised in The Episcopal Church. I would have joined earlier if I'd known how. But I didn't even know that it was possible to join a church: I thought you could only get into a religion by birth or marriage. I never even had the courage to go to a church service: I was afraid I'd be identified as a heathen, embarrassed and ejected.
Joining the church wasn't an easy decision. I was an undergraduate and no one I knew was a religious believer. It was not done"”at least not by people like us.
In any case, I didn't know whether I could buy in. Lying in bed I would recite the Creed to myself in Latin as a sort of checklist. "Credo in unum Deum." Did I believe that? Well I certainly didn't believe in any more than one God. But the story seized me"”the grand, cosmic scope of all things visible and invisible, the drama of incarnation and ascension"”descendit, incarnatus, ascendit"”and the slam-bang ending, the power, glory and eternal dominion. Schubert was sweet but only Bach could do justice to the sheer immensity of it.
But did I believe it? I decided, as I then thought of it, to "bracket the God question" and join the church anyway. I just couldn't resist.
Since my music camp conversion experience, I'd sung lots of masses and other sacred music. I'd read T. S. Eliot and the Metaphysical Poets; I'd wallowed in Traherne's Centuries of Meditations lying on the summer grass in the quad when the corn, there in the American Midwest, really was orient and immortal wheat; and I'd discovered George Herbert onRead Full Article »
