Evensong Invasion

I hadn’t fully recalled that Evensong now twenty-eight years ago until the other night when I attended a ‘salon’ for the restoration of the organ. But that said, that Evensong lives very close to my consciousness and rises in my memory with very little effort.

Probably the first time I ever heard the organ at St. Paul’s (then) Church would have been in 1970 when I was taking a music appreciation course at Palomar College. All students were required to attend live concerts and then write essays about what they heard. That night, an organist from Europe played the Toccata and Fugue in F Major by J. S. Bach among several other pieces which I cannot remember. Some years later, I happened to attend a Christmas Lessons and Carols service, so I was to that small extent familiar with St. Paul’s and its organ and choir.

In 1982 while living in Orange County, I happened to be in San Diego over Sunday night, and either by chance or divine design, I parked near St. Paul’s. It was just about 5:00PM, the doors were open, and I decided to go in to see if there might be an organ concert. I sat down in the quiet and dimly lit nave.

No concert, but the boys choir solemnly processed in to soft music from the organ. The officiant took his place and read the opening sentence, and then intoned the introit, answered by the choir. Then came the evening hymn which I still remember and now know as Bromley by Haydn (Hymn 29 in the 1982 hymnal). I sang along although the tune and words were new to me.

Then the suffrages, the anthem during the offering, and the prayers. Simple, and just as we celebrate Evensong these days. But this one had got into me somehow. I didn’t feel a ‘whammy’ from the organ; we usually don’t get the organ’s full power displayed at Evensong anyway. What I experienced was more of an invasion, and I was aware that something mystical had happened to me, something that I am still unable to describe fully. It was nevertheless a palpable movement toward rendering me into another person, one who had come into the church completely indifferent to anything but the possibility of hearing a free concert, to one who fell to his knees in awe and admiration for the power that I knew had transformed me so suddenly.

All of the elements of that service combined to do the work I feel that God intended: the organ, the choir, the officiant, the prayers, but particularly the organ which was vehicular in bringing to my deepest consciousness that I had come home, I had returned from over twenty years of prodigal living, that a loving father was welcoming me back into the warm embrace of love.

Nearly thirty years later, I am still here, still in that embrace, and one of the great honors and joys I am given at St. Paul’s Cathedral is to be an officiant at Evensong. Now the music that helped find me and bring me home, works with me as I intone the introit, chant the suffrages, and sing the collects.

As I remember those first soft organ tones that led the choir into Evensong those years ago, I wonder how many other people have been moved by the beauty of the organ to come back to God, to find themselves surrounded and overwhelmed by the Almighty effort to bring all of us home.

And now, the organ needs our help. How could I not do everything I possibly can to help in the campaign to restore an instrument that is so integral to the spiritual life at St. Paul’s? To be without it, to let it disintegrate is unthinkable. To renovate the cathedral organ is to give it a fuller measure of God’s voice, to lend it the sounds from of indescribable beauty that are a foretaste of eternity for all who enter through our doors.

Robert Heylmun