Yesterday, I attended an organ recital at the Methodist church downtown. The building has been standing for more than 100 years. Its congregation more than 150.
The exterior of the building is an intricate design of brick and stained glass with doors and staircases and windows leading to far too many nooks and crannies to ever explore. The main sanctuary is at the top of a set of steep stone steps, through a tight lobby outfitted with intricate woodwork and a sitting area (I think it's called a narthex) that strongly resembles a funeral parlor — open in the middle with threadbare couches and chairs lining the perimeter. Wrinkled red carpet. Photos of people who had been dead for 50+ years hanging in heavy gold frames on the walls. The whole shebang.
Several people greeted me on my way into the sanctuary, which stood in stark contrast to the moribund narthex. The floor sloped at a gentle grade toward the front of the sanctuary. Long wooden pews arced back from the stage (which I just learned is called the chancel) in four sections. Afternoon light streamed through the stained glass panels that flanked both sides of the room.
The organ was the centerpiece. Having grown up in a Southern Baptist Church built in the mid-1900s, I'm used to the organ console sitting off to the side, allowing the baptismal to be front and center. As a child, I remember climbing around on the stage after service as my parents mingled. The organist once demonstrated how to play the beast — three keyboards stacked on top of each other with a cockpit of buttons and knobs and pedals to push and pull simultaneously.
At Court Street United Methodist Church, the organ console sits in the middle of the chancel so that the organist's back faces the congregation. You can see the rows of keys, staircased on top of each other, and the knobs. A camera had been placed to the side with its view projected onto the wall above the console. Throughout the recital, you could watch the musician work — his hands and feet playing in unison and discord to create a symphony of one.
While watching an organist pilot the instrument is magnificent, the console is not the most remarkable part of it. Its hundreds of pipes framing the chancel like a pair of enormous metal wings are the true spectacle, though only the tip of the iceberg. The bellows — the breath in an organ's lungs — and the intricate network of trackers, little mechanical veins that carry the notes from the console to the pipes, are hidden below the surface and behind the carved wooden facade of the chancel. My head hurts thinking about the complexity of it.
I attended the recital in part because of my curiosity for old churches, especially those that follow a more liturgical style of worship. Mainly, I attended because my grandmother was an organist, and I wanted, for a few brief moments, to feel her again.
As the organist, a man not much older than me, bent over the keys in passion, I almost saw Grandma K with her halo of white hair sitting at the console. His fingers tapped one set of keys while his thumb reached down to stroke the step below. Stomping up and down in perfect rhythm, his feet danced on the lower pedals.
"She liked to play loud," Mom once told me. And until yesterday, I thought she meant volume. Organs are loud by default. But I now think she meant Grandma K liked to make a show of it — to let loose in a way she would never dare to outside of a console.
As the music swelled and filled the nave, the little man at the controls seemed to grow larger. His movements exaggerated and, in turn, the music blasted louder and louder, shaking the pendant lighting. The room rumbled, sending tremors up from the soles of my feet. We thundered down a jetway, preparing to take off into the heavens on those great metal wings.
He withdrew his fingers from the keys and lifted his feet from the pedals. The boom of the pipes faded and then we glided. A lovely lightness filled my head, lifting it a few inches from my shoulders as I savored the pin-drop silence.
I've been thinking about death a lot recently.
Before you roll your eyes, know it's not morbid.
I've been thinking about the death of institutions.
After the concert, my in-laws and I loitered in the narthex for a few minutes, examining the photographs of long-deceased church members and admiring the woodwork and crown molding. "You can't buy that at Home Depot," my father-in-law joked.
Based on the size of the church alone, I assumed there were a couple hundred members, but one of the greeters told me the congregation only had about 30 people. Only the sanctuary, the funeral parlor, and the small rooms around its perimeter were utilized by the congregation. The rest of the block-spanning building sat empty.
"We used to have a daycare, but we had to close it due to low attendance," the greeter said.
A bulletin board displaying the church's history sat in the back corner of the lobby. Built in 1902, the original building cost $80,000 — about $2.5 million today. The congregation had paid for it in cash. Families donated their hard-earned money to build a place of worship they took pride in and hoped would last for generations to come. Now, just a portion of the building is used by the church.
Just two blocks down is another church, more than 200 years old. Its congregation has long died out, and the remaining husk is the police department's west building. When my husband was in the police academy, I took a class with him in the prayer chapel. It had been stripped of its pews and instead had a handful of banquet tables and folding chairs arranged in a U-shape around the pulpit, which had been outfitted with a chalkboard and podium.
Instead of an organ and the ornate woodwork expected of churches from its time, the sanctuary has been emptied out and filled with weight-lifting equipment. Sunday school rooms have been converted into interrogation rooms. One of them has been repurposed into something called the "blood room."
The transformation is unsettling.
I don't know what I'm trying to say. I've been thinking a lot about the death of institutions, but I don't have any insights — nothing original at least. Hundreds of churches just like the one on Court Street have shuttered and been transformed into homes, event spaces, and even police departments. Others have been torn down entirely.
I'm going to keep going to organ recitals and historic church tours and anything else I can stick my nose in to satisfy my curiosity, all the while reminding myself that the beauty I enjoy is vanity, even when it was created to represent or honor the divine. It's ephemeral. It was never meant to last forever, no matter how hard we may try to preserve it. Even the best embalming expires.
"The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever." — Isaiah 40:8
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