Museums & Architecture

After a satisfying bagel with inch thick cream cheese, we walked along the Park to the Natural History museum(AMNH); a dead zoo, more or less, but forever loved by the boys as the site of Night at the Museum. Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the opposite side, these 19th century behemoths are cultural temples, similar to the old banks downtown, impressively flanking the great park; the Frick museum down the road originally a home.

 ++++

Museums are sometimes mentioned as secular sacred spaces with their trophies & icons, but Teddy Roosevelt's aim as New York governor - whose statue graces the AMNH front steps - was to, in a sense, curate nature; forever since US national parks registering as our cathedrals, landmarks.

The IMAX film exhibit linked Roosevelt's profound encounter with nature to the deaths of his mother and wife, both dying in the same house within hours.  Afterwards, a pivotal camping trip with naturalist John Muir would turn the Sequoias, Yosemite Valley, and Yellowstone into national treasures - nature as momento in an act of mourning, bequeathing a national estate to future citizens.

+++++

The day before, Debby and Udo guided us through the brand new opening of Fulton Station in Wall Street,

almost as controversial (for $ and design) as nearby Oculus,

the expansive new transportation hub for Wall Street which felt like a modern Grand Central Station, in its cavernous public space.The Empire State Building for its interior splash and outdoor vistas:

+++++

 The Fulton subway station had beautiful tile mosaics of the inventor's steamship,

 

reminding of the beautiful metro stops in Paris.

 

Magnolias were blooming in the park.

- - a view from the museum restaurant facing the park, after an energetic tour of the Italian renaissance - the museum's strong suit - by Nadja, starting with a neglected Della Robia glazed relief: 

 Managed a quick visit to MOMA to show the boys the modern masterpieces,

 

 

as well as this great exhibit of SANAA, the renowned Japanese architectural firm, which won the Pritzker a few years back for their design of Lausanne's EPFL library.

 Models of the firm's global work were on display.

Museums and buildings all done in one packed afternoon!

Medieval New York

NYC Holy Week on a Pepperdine boondoggle. JD Rockefeller Jr had portions of European abbeys reconstructed in upper Manhattan in a medieval environment, far removed from downtown noise - a beautiful retreat marking a liturgical calendar - called The Cloisters.

  Surrounded by cobblestone, the site is a remarkable throwback to the middle ages: herb gardens, cloisters, chapels and extensive collection of illuminated manuscripts.

JD Rockefeller Jr was an early liberal, theologically speaking, supporting Union Seminary and the building of St John the Divine Cathedral, which celebrates a wide variety of religion in its chapels, ever expanding and purposely never complete.
Michael really wanted to see the Cloisters and the boys, hopefully, made connections to visited sites in Europe, like Mont St Michel in Normandy, where the water ebbs and flows according to tide, illustrating the creation act:

 “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Oceans have been domesticated as wonderful vistas for play in modern times, registering as chaos, formlessness, before industry tamed them; the abbey here - the earth itself - becomes an elaborate life raft; the liturgical calendar a cathedral in the shapelessness of time.

 +++++

 We decided to attend St George's Episcopal for Tenebrae, though perhaps too spent after heavy sightseeing to appreciate the tragic quiet of the elders robed in black,

 
carrying a black-veiled cross.

 

 +++

Two days earlier, we attended Bach at One, a world class Bach program begun 5 years ago at Trinity Church in Wall Street.

or more precisely St Paul's Chapel,

where we heard the choir practice.

The church next to the Twin Towers, achieving miracle status for surviving 9/11, was a triage site and memorial retold in this moving children's book

On March 23, 2016, we were treated to 3 cantatas sung feet away in the first Episcopal church in America, where George Washington prayed at his private box following his inauguration nearby.

 Church and State fused in a new way now, starkly remembered inside and at the nearby 9/11 memorial of water flowing in a grave-like pit - not a spring of life, let alone fountain of youth. Certainty here is of loss; eternal hopelessness anchoring the names etched along a communal tombstone,

 

an overall vector unlike the gravestones of adjacent St Paul, pointing upward; worship alive next door.

+++

I leave with this 1956 shot of Manhattan, reminding me of similar scenes of LA's city hall of my childhood, and the bright yellow of forsythia, reminding of Ithaca grad school days. April is the Spring!

Christmas 2014

It began with singing in a traditonal Lessons and Carols, which we used to do at All Saints Vevey. Lately, L&C services have made their way into many church calendars, usually leaning towards a song/reading format bereft of liturgical sense, however; ie not much waiting involved.  Christ Church followed King's service in Cambridge, our music director taking cues from the Ralph Vaughn Williams era of the service's history. It was very moving to participate in the evening, creating something together.  

 +++

Stepping back, we first gathered as a church, with advent lessons and gingerbread housemaking,

preparing for the L&C by studying Sainsbury's supermarket's well-produced ad this Christmas, marking various truces between British and German soldiers; 2014 marking the 100th anniversary of WWI, as did the Tower of London's art installation:

a sea of approximately 900K ceramic poppies representing the UK dead. 

WWI was the immediate context for Cambridge's Lessons & Carols Service, inaugurated 1918 by an army chaplain, remembering "those in a distant shore" in the bidding prayer. Misery and bloodshed accompanies Christmas, historically speaking, as in King Herod's slaughter of the innocents and evoked in the melancholy of many carols:  the bleak midwinter, indeed.

The L&C service readings from Genesis and Isaiah foretell the coming of the messiah, mirroring a grand medieval tradition of the Jesse Tree:

"And he shall come from the root of Jesse":

This panel of the Tree is from Chartres Cathedral, a branch of Jesse birthing David and so on, leading to Christ, but

the medieval section of the MET has a smaller example! The windows vary from church to church, as do the gospel genealogies, highlighting different meanings, but all reinforcing spiritual adoption - a concept whose time has come, making sense of those birthing metaphors: "You must be born again to enter the kingdom of God."

 +++++

We took in "A Christmas Carol" at the delightful Glendale Circle Theater, as well.

Back to Eve. After a night of wrapping, we got up for our orange rolls, an Edith Schaeffer favorite, easing into panettone later in the day.BTW, I bought a pricey panettone from an Italian pastry chef, but found not much difference in quality? Our favorite thus far dates to a Trader Joe's purchase in the '90s in which whole chestnuts were encrusted on top and throughout.Auntie Ev couldn't make it, due to her new nursing job placing her at the bottom of the pecking order, but grandpa flew in from IL, which was a mean feat at nearly 90!  Michael and Jack enjoy Aunt Stephanie's exuberance and humor.

  Hard to match the energy levels of the boys who were very patient to wait for the grown-ups to mobilize for the morning.

Aunt Stephanie has discovered many Hebraic traditions in her fellowship, introducing us to a menorah tradition.

Looking at these photos, it strikes me M&J have graced us with another cycle of youth, like a family of kids moving into the neighborhood.

It's hard to emphasize enough the waiting of advent is not waiting upon the birth - which obviously already occurred - but another coming. Lest Christmas fossilize into nostalgia, a spiritual Groundhog Day, a ruthless pounding away of the years, rather than true hope of something new.

Appropriately closing with kid art: