St Paul's Cathedral

On a family vacation to London, we found ourselves at the world-famous St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It being a Sunday, sightseeing was closed, but visitors were welcome to attend the various services that day. I attended the 11:30 am Sung Eucharist. People who know me are now giggling... yes, on my vacation, me and my atheist family went to church. ;-)

I have never been to an Anglican service before, but having been to more than a few Catholic services, I felt well at home with the formality and the ritual. I'm used to the responses spoken by the attendees and I take part in them. I get a little pleasure out of blowing my wife's mind that I know how to follow along, but mostly I do it out of respect and a desire to make other people around me feel comfortable with my attendance.

The Cathedral is enormous. It's an immense space, and attendance was light. I live in Los Angeles, and I'm used to our Catholic cathedral being wall to wall people, and then some. So it was a bit of a shock to see such a lightly-attended service there in the heart of one of the great cities of the world. The cavernous space highlighted a service where empty chairs outnumbered the attendees.

As we entered, I know my wife was trepidatious that we were in essence cheating. Here we were, both atheists, attending service mostly as tourists, along with our 3 year old daughter. I had no qualms, as my curiosity about the building and the service were genuine, and I knew I could fit in just fine. She was not raised with religion and sometimes it can be an alien landscape to her.

Immediately an usher asked if we were attending the service. I take it his job was to shoo away tourists, and it added to my wife's nervousness. What a pity that this had to be the case. Churches, especially this one, shouldn't have this kind of stare-down to attend service. Who knows what God's purpose might be for people attending? If there is indeed a God, might He not touch the heart of a wandering tourist at that very moment?

Anyway, my assurance that we were there to attend services allowed us past the usher and to some seats. The service was already in progress, so we took seats quietly and near to us. We moved up some more during an appropriate moment, but we didn't get all the way under the dome. As I said, this was an enormous space, and during a break an usher told us he could find room for us in the dome if we liked... but we were there with a 3 year old and I wanted to make sure we could leave with a minimum of disruption if we had to... so we stayed put.

We sat in the Church where Charles and Diana were married, and listened to the fantastic music. The choir is simply world-class. The architecture was second-to-none. The service was long and full of important ceremony.

The sermon portion was I think given by Reverend Winkett, and I particularly liked it. It had an everyday lesson about the difficulty of doing any creative task, and the problems that writers face when staring at a blank page. Her solution was that writers when starting a novel should start by writing on a single page what their story is about, and then throw that away.

She brought up stories about the apostles and how radical their religious callings were to them... how disruptive that was to their lives, and how much following Christ means making uncomfortable changes in your life.

I liked the sermon. I liked the creative advice, and I liked the open and basic tone to her delivery. This was a sophisticated sermon, spoken plainly.

During a moment of prayer, she asked people to pray for the people at Virginia Tech and their families, and I was genuinely touched. Here were were in a foreign country, far away from home, and the people of London were offering their sympathy. It was a moment of caring that I was glad to have witnessed.

After these parts, the collection plate was passed and I made my offering. We left before communion.

I regret that this isn't a more thorough church report, but we had to move on...a three-year old can't sit for too long on an empty stomache.

My ratings are an overall 4. 2 for friendlyness... they don't exactly make all comers feel welcome because of their desire to weed out the tourists. 5 for singing (maybe a six or a seven!). 5 for the preaching.

I like that it was a church that I felt I could attend, it being a symbol of London and a symbol of the Anglican Church. I'd rather be able to just find a seat and quietly sit without the sizing-up. While I don't care for an overly-long service, I understand that's part of the appeal here.

In a space like this, with a service this grand... your mind begins to wander and starts to question if the grandiosity of the service and the cathedral is what is being worshipped. Thankfully, the Reverend Winkett grounded it with her sermon and put much of that to rest.

As an atheist, I can't say I got anything spiritual out of the experience, but I enjoyed it from a cultural standpoint.

Later in the trip I visited the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and saw John Harrison's clocks, including H1, in operation. That was far more what I'd call a spriritual experience.

We find significance in different moments.