Skip to main content

Nightwatch

This past weekend, we took a group of middle and high schoolers from St. Aidan's to New York City.  It was a quick trip - left Friday at noon and returned Saturday at 9 p.m.  But full of adventure.  We arrived in time for dinner and ate at a pizza place across from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  I'm not sure if it was really the best pizza in the world, or if I was just starving and thrilled to have arrived safely.
After dinner, we checked into the Cathedral for its Nightwatch program, which is basically a lock-in.  There were about 80 youth from Connecticut, NY, Maryland, and Virginia, some Episcopal and some not.  They started us out with some ice-breakers.  (This is our group watching the Cowboys, Ninjas, Bears tournament -- lock rock, paper, scissors but more of a full-body experience.)

They had a great band of young and very talented musicians that led music for worship.  We started with a singing downstairs in the gym, where we would later spend the night.


(These girls in front are not from our group.  Being good Episcopalians, our youth never found themselves in the front row of anything.)
 They led us into the Cathedral with no light up there except candles and blasted us with the organ.  After hearing a pretty incredible organ demonstration (including an impromtu riff on Twinkle Twinkle and the Pink Panther theme), they put out a labyrinth and for about an hour our group rotated through it with meditative music in the background.  Most of our youth (maybe even all of them) hadn't walked a labyrinth before.  We have one at St. Aidan's, and I love it, but there's definitely a different feel when surrounded by a Cathedral in candlelight.
There was some free time after that, with lots of basketball playing in the gym below.  At about midnight, we gathered back up in the Cathedral for a midnight candlelight Eucharist.  I was the only Episcopal clergy there so got to celebrate, so now I can say I've celebrated communion at a Cathedral.
Lights went out in the gym at 1:30 a.m. and we slept pretty soundly until 7 a.m.  Breakfast, clean-up, and then a tour of the cathedral, which looked very different by day, with sunlight pouring through all those stained glass windowns.
(Can't remember who this was, but the kids were entranced with his bald marble head.)
We met the resident peacocks (not pictured), packed up our stuff, and headed out into the city.
We took a bus to Rockefeller Plaza so we could see the sights along the way, including Central Park.  We had some serious 30 Rock fans in the group.
We walked to Times Square (where we apparently just missed a flash mob) to people watch and of course make an obligatory visit to the M&M store.  Then by subway to Ground Zero where we walked through St. James Chapel to see memorabilia from that time and saw the new buildings going up.  I was filled with emotion in the Chapel and it was odd to think that the youth with us were just babies in 2001.  But how completely that experience has changed the world for them.

A great trip and a fabulous bunch of youth!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gospel as Stand-Up Comedy

April 8, 2018 Easter 2 John 20:19-31 Today in the church world is often called Low Sunday because of the generally low attendance.  After all, everyone came last week and heard the biggest story of all! So church can be crossed off the to-do list for a while. Have you heard the joke about the man who came out of church on Easter and the minister pulled him aside and said, "You need to join the Army of the Lord!" The man replied, "I'm already in the Army of the Lord."  The minister questioned, “Then how come I don't see you except at Christmas and Easter?" The man whispered back, "I'm in the secret service."   I recently heard a name for today that I much prefer to Low Sunday - Holy Humor Sunday.  Apparently, the early church had a tradition of observing the week following Easter Sunday as "days of joy and laughter" with parties and picnics to celebrate Jesus' resurrection.  And so there is a (small but grow...

Ascension Day for Modern People - the Overview Effect

May 8, 2016 Ascension Day The Ascension of Jesus into heaven is a tricky story for us modern people.  We imagine, maybe, the medieval religious art that shows Jesus wearing his white robe floating up into the sky above the astonished disciples, emerging above the clouds.   Or, maybe instead, we imagine it more like a scene from Star Trek: “Beam me up, God!”   In the early Church’s world view, this story would have made more sense.  Back when people understand the world to be flat and hadn’t yet explored the heavens with space shuttles and satellites and telescopes.  It’s harder now to take this story seriously.  We’ve been above the clouds - we know what’s up there.  Luckily for the modern Church, the Feast of the Ascension falls 10 days before the Feast of Pentecost, which means it’s always on a weekday and is pretty easy to skip.  We can go straight from Easter and the post-resurrection stories to Pentecost and never...

Prayer Stations through the Church Year

Yesterday instead of a sermon I created a series of prayer stations.  We are on the cusp of Advent, the start of the Church year, so it seemed like a great time to take a walk through the seasons of the Church calendar. Advent Advent is a season of waiting and hoping.  At this prayer station, people could create a different kind of Advent calendar.  We each chose 25 strips of purple and pink paper and write a prayer, scripture passage, or idea of something to do on a day of Advent on each strip.  Each day, a link is added to the chain until it is complete for Christmas. Christmas During Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus.  At this prayer station were gathered multiple nativity creches.  People were invited to read the Christmas story from Luke and Matthew and walk through the story, imagining what it might have been like for its participants.  We had on hand the People of God figures from Godly Play so we could even place ourselves into ...