Page 8 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

8
PERSPECTIVE
Not Just a Pretty Building by Zachariah Allen ’56
The Spring 2013 issue of Alumni Horae
was dedicated to the role of religion at
St. Paul’s School and to recognizing the
125th anniversary of the “new” Chapel
at the School. In the article Finding
Meaning, I am cited as “not impressed”
by the short liturgy used for the Chapel
“service” that opened our October 2011
meeting of alumni volunteers. I was, in
fact, deeply disturbed by the non-sec-
tarian nature of this brief service. It
lacked both form and substance.
As we left the service, I expressed my
feelings to a colleague. Overheard by a
member of the Board of Trustees, I was
roundly rebuked for those feelings. That
left me wondering if I was substituting
nostalgia for principle. After much intro-
spection and study, I think not.
Finding Meaning begins with a brief
examination of what it means to be a
“religious school” in a contemporary
context. The conclusion was that the
people who might want to send their
child to a top-notch preparatory school
like SPS would be “pushed away” by the
notion that SPS is a “religious” school.
The article seems to resolve this by
indicating that an “Episcopal heritage”
does not bind SPS to being a religious
school. That resolution misses the point
of what St. Paul’s was: religion was the
substance, not the veneer.
Yet, St. Paul’s School continues to
define itself as a church school. The
reference, for a while, on the SPS Chapel
web page to “the world’s wisdom tradi-
tions” instead of to the various faiths of
the world would seem consistent with this
discomfort about seeming too religious.
I asked a recent graduate about the
role of the Chapel. The answer was, “It’s
a beautiful building where we meet a few
times a week.” Evidently, it is not seen as
primarily a place of worship.
The religious regimentation that char-
acterized SPS for at least the first 100 years
of its existence is a distant memory today.
Sunday services are not obligatory and
are so sparsely attended (less than 15 per-
cent of the student body) that they are
now held in the “Old Chapel.”
These changes at SPS have been well-
intended. They conform to a standing
objective of the School to be more
“diverse.” The unintended consequence
of the pursuit of diversity has been the
denial of religious identity.
Is that the right answer to the chal-
lenge of an increasingly diverse society
at large? I think not, but I can only an-
swer that question in the light of my
own personal life experience.
I have always valued my self-assigned
identity as an Episcopalian. But, for a
number of years I was isolated from the
church itself and the practice of attending
regular church services. During 11 of
those years I lived in Warsaw, Poland.
There were moments when I felt isolated
and depressed.
Perhaps the most depressing moments
were the long, dark, cold nights. I was
living alone in a country where I did not
speak the language, had no friends and
few acquaintances. I started reading
Polish history to get an understanding
of where I was and what culture I was
living in. I read a lot about the history of
the Jewish people in Poland, up to and
through the Second World War. Often,
I would walk the streets of what had
been the Ghetto, walled off during the
War, and where so many suffered and
died horribly. Some of the residential
buildings had been left just as they were
after being blown up, with people still
in them, in the final days of the Ghetto
Uprising.
As I walked those dark, empty streets,
my mind often turned for strength to
remembering our weekly Sunday Even-
song services, which had become more
meaningful to me as the years passed.
I could still recite the prayers from mem-
ory; the one best remembered is known
as Cardinal Newman’s Prayer (‘O Lord,
support us all the day long....’). That got
me through those hard days and many
since. With time, I have come to under-
stand and appreciate the religious foun-
dation the School gave us, whether or
not we wanted or appreciated it.
As I was reflecting upon why the Chapel
proceeding in October 2011 at SPS upset
me so, I began to worry that SPS has re-
jected its roots while trying to rationalize
somehow that it has not.
In his Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis
complains about what he calls the Litur-
gical Fidget. That is, the priest (minister,
pastor) being inventive, waxing eloquently
with original prayers rather than simply
“The Chapel of
St. Peter and St. Paul
was meticulously
designed to define
the School, not the
other way around.”