Liturgy Update

Celebrating Cathedral — Great Music

For twenty years now, St. James Cathedral has celebrated the contributions of cathedrals to civilization and the arts through our music program’s annual Great Music for Great Cathedrals.

Cathedrals are places of unique possibility and challenge. They do not seek the safety of the suburbs; instead, they thrive in the midst of the city, where they can open their doors to people of every race and nation, rich and poor, believers and non-believers alike. They are places where both spirit and mind are nourished (it is no accident that the first universities developed in and around cathedrals!). Cathedrals embrace the world around them, but they also challenge the secular world with constant reminders of the sacred: with towers reaching to heaven, with bells summoning us to recollection and prayer, with art and music that give us glimpses of the divine, and above all with the proclamation of the living word and the celebration of the sacraments.

Great Music for Great Cathedrals celebrates all this by taking us to cathedrals throughout the world and throughout history, giving us wonderful glimpses into liturgy as it might have been—a coronation, a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a solemn funeral procession, a medieval drama—and at the same time, through music, light, and movement, Great Music opens our eyes to the beauty of our own Cathedral of St. James.

Over 200 Cathedral parishioners—children and adults, musicians and dancers, stage hands, servers, ushers, and others—come together to make Great Music happen each year just before Ash Wednesday. Last year’s production was named one of the top ten classical music events of 2003 by Richard Campbell of the Seattle P-I. In other words: don’t miss it!

CATHEDRAL!
Center of the city, hub of life!
Heart of the local Church
and link with Church universal.
Place of the cathedra, the bishop’s chair.
The sacred place
in which heaven’s justice bends down
to embrace the earth
and make it fruitful.
The place from which God’s favors radiate
to consecrate the whole world
and make of it one temple
of the living God.

From the beginning, the cathedral
     (unlike the solitary anchorite)
sets itself not in the wilderness
     escaping from the world
but as the still eye in the cyclone
     of urban bustle—
at the hub of the world and its affairs.
The cathedral speaks of God’s delight
to be in the midst of the children
     of women and men.
There God embraces the human
     and the human God;
and in that embrace is born
creativity, communion, culture and its arts,
the crown of all that is human.

Narration for Great Music for Great Cathedrals
by Thomas B. Stratman

Great Music will be presented February 20th and 21st at 8:00 pm in the Cathedral (the dress rehearsal, a.k.a. “ parish night”, is February 19th).

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