In the Candlelight: Reflections & Remembrance at a Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx
NEW YORK — An elderly woman stood over an array of mostly unlit candles at St. Barnabas Roman Catholic Church, which is located in a heavily Irish neighborhood on the border between The Bronx and Yonkers. Dusk hung heavy inside the nave as the raw, rainy evening filtered through dark stained glass. Three or four lit candles weakly brightened the dim space, leaving a detailed painting of Jesus peeking through the shadows on the high ceiling.
The woman arched her head downward. Two middle aged men leaned on either side of her, the three bodies close, their puffy winter coats forming one whole. They were silent, but their emotion — unmistakeable grief — cut across the room. After a moment, the trio quickly shuffled into the growing crowd of congregants.
It was Sunday evening at St. Barnabas, located at 409 East 242nd Street. Sturdy and rectangular, the Italianate-style church has beckoned Woodlawn’s Catholics for Sabbath celebrations since 1911. On the Catholic liturgical calendar, it was the Fourth in Ordinary Time and the faithful were quietly taking their places in the church’s long wooden pews. Filling up yet leaving everyone with ample personal space, a few families and many lone elders took their seats. Some dressed casually — tight jeans and a fleece — while others were more proper — a suit and tie under a tan peacoat.
Walking the line between the two styles, a polished 20-something in a shirt with a loose top button and no tie walked past the pews. He brought a narrow binder from the sacristy, a bright white room where the priest and altar servers prepared for the 5 o’clock mass, due to start in about two minutes.
The lights flashed on in dramatic fashion, yellowish LEDs supplanting the wiggling candle glow. The elaborate fresco-style painting above the altar led all eyes to Jesus Christ, heroically pictured at the center, surrounded by the Holy Family, the Apostles and flying cherubs. Around the altar, floral arrangements, green, white and red-orange evoked, perhaps by coincidence, the Irish Republican tricolors flying throughout the neighborhood.
The young man read a few announcements from a binder. He welcomed visitors, proclaimed that St. Patrick’s Day was fast approaching (it was still January), and read out a Wikipedia-style appeal for donations.
“If everyone here today donated…”
After mass, a few more people approached the candles. There were six separate arrays — two at the back, four at the front, including two dated-looking tables of electronic “candles” with push buttons that could light up your plastic tube of choice. The real candles were far more popular; none of the electric candles were turned on.
Names were engraved on the edge of the arrays, recalling the memory of various parishioners. Boxes with small slots hung beneath the candles, instructing how to donate if you wish to light one. One woman dropped a few dollars in the box. She lit two candles and knelt deeply before them, whispering a prayer.
Soon, she rushed off, perhaps bothered by my presence, and I decided to let her be.
Outside, I caught up with the fashionable lector named Terrance Tunnock (“T-U-N-N-O-C-K… Like the tea biscuit”) who told me he reads every week at 5 p.m. He said the candles are for special intentions, hopes, wishes, prayers. Often, people light candles for those they have lost.
As the dusk turned to night, the nave emptied out. Tunnock began tidying up around the church entrance, the priest returned to the sacristy, and the candles burned.
Sacred Streams: Awareness and Intentionality in Druidry
NEW YORK – It was 1 p.m. in New York City and 6 p.m. in the United Kingdom, when Nick Gent, 44, a Druidic sound healer, began his virtual Druidry class on Friday, Feb. 2. The class was small — just one woman from Connecticut signed on — so Gent started right away.
The class, called Practical Druidry, was one of a series that Gent offers online. Though he encouraged reading books and other materials to learn about Druidry, the lessons he teaches in his class are from his lifetime of practical experience.
“I have always known the world to be alive and full of magic,” Gent said later.
Druidry is a spiritual practice and one form of neo-paganism that focuses on having a relationship with the natural world. Druidry is often practiced alone, but there are also groups of Druids around the world who do ceremonies together.
There is no definitive number of people who practice Druidry, but one of the largest Druid groups — the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, based in the U.K. — has more than 30,000 members in 50 countries.
Gent, from London, is a musician and has been a sound healer for over a decade. He has also been a druid his whole life. He offers one-on-one sessions for teaching Druidry, as well as his weekly Practical Druidry classes, which don’t often get a huge turnout. The people who do show up are typically from Europe and the U.S.
In this particular hour-long class, Gent talked his student through what he called the 10 mirrors of Awen, a step-by-step process to help someone see their own mind clearly and then relate to the external, natural world.
Each of the 10 steps involved a visualization, a three-syllable sound and breathwork, all guided by Gent. The second step, “the mirror of stream,” was about becoming aware of one’s emotions. Gent led his student to close her eyes and visualize herself walking by a clear, flowing stream.
“Each ripple, perhaps, could represent for us an emotion, arising from the depths and then naturally flowing on its path,” Gent said. “Here, the idea is to observe how the ripples form, travel to the water’s surface and then fade away, just like the natural flow of the emotions within us.”
Like a stream allows waves to pass through it, Gent encouraged his student to accept and understand her emotions, rather than try to change or resist them.
Gent then made a humming sound to follow the visualization, a sound he said he made up.
“The actual sound itself doesn’t matter,” he said.
Instead, what matters is the intention behind the sound.
“You can use any sound that feels right to you,” he said. “We can embed our intentionality, or consciousness, if you’d like, to some degree, on the waveform.”
Later in the class, Gent explained the significance of flowing water.
“In Druidry, in a practical sense, streams and rivers are very much seen as sacred,” Gent said.
“They symbolize life, healing, purification, the passage of time, the cycles of the earth, on a physical level. But the stream, like we just talked about, is also a metaphor for the flow of emotions, thoughts.”
As the class came to an end, Gent encouraged his student to practice the skills and concepts from the 10 mirrors and to integrate them into her daily practice, or in daily life.
“The lesson of the water is to help you navigate those thoughts and emotions, but also to understand how you might be able to manage them, using the principle of flowing, the natural flow,” Gent said.
“Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord”: Chanting in the Orthodox Church
BROOKLYN — The Divine Liturgy at St. Nicholas Antioch Cathedral in Brooklyn on a recent rainy Sunday morning overwhelms the senses. Incense hangs heavily in the air, and the icons are everywhere, painted on the walls and the ceiling. Sacred relics are set aside for viewing. Candles decorate the whole space. There are yellow candles in the back for parishioners to light. The red candles in front of the icons at the front of the sanctuary. There are rows of light wooden pews, but most people are standing. The chanting has already begun to the left side of the nave.
St. Nicholas Antioch Cathedral is located at 355 State Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. It’s an Antiochian Orthodox Church. The stone church was first built as an Episcopal church in the 1850s. It was made in the Gothic style with high arches. It became an Orthodox church in 1920. On Sundays, Matins is sung before Divine Liturgy begins at 10:30.
The liturgical chanters are primarily men, a single woman in their midst. They stand in a circle, surrounding a music stand with a golden cross at the center. Some men have iPads and others have sheets of paper. For the most part, they sing alone. The congregation does not sing along. The chanters go back and forth between English and Arabic. Dressed in shades of navy and black and gray and cream, their voices are deep. “Praise Him. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord,” they sing. As congregants enter the church, the chanters’ words are there to greet them. The chants are responsorial. The priest and the chanters are in conversation, and the congregation are the witnesses.
Among the chanters is George Zain. Five years ago, Zain started taking chanting lessons with a priest. He took lessons once a week for three years. Most of the men in the choir have classically Western backgrounds, but Zain favors the Byzantine style. For him, the Western style is more analytic, but with the Byzantine chanting, he said, there is more room to elaborate. “The beauty is you can play with it more.” He sings words like “Resurrection” and “Light,” and gestures upwards. But other words like “death” and “Hades,” he says, “it’s more chromatic, it’s down here.” The liturgical songs are meant to go beyond understanding, and directly engage your heart. There is a mystical quality to it.
Zain feels keenly his responsibility as a liturgical singer, recognizing he has had times where he would sing the words but his heart wasn’t engaged. He feels strongly that the chanting is best done, not with the most pleasing voice, but with an engaged spirit that feels deeply what they are saying. The purpose of liturgical songs is clear to him: “it’s to transcend the faithful, edify the faithful.”
The songs aren’t something you have to understand. “The musician can still speak to you even if you don’t understand. The text, it can transcend body and soul.” Chanting is a crucial part of the Orthodox service, a service that is all about the senses, according to Zain. The rich incense, the gold, the iconography, the chanting—the body is engaged so that the heart can be reached.
Desire for God: A Teaching on the Story of Zacchaeus
NEW YORK — The Rev. Thomas Zain of St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church in Brooklyn faces his congregation as the choir sings, “Intercede with Christ, He will save our souls.” Everyone is standing. A letter from Scripture is sung by one of the chanters after which, Zain sings, “The Holy Gospel” and makes the sign of the cross. The congregation does the same. Zain chants from the Gospel of Luke, the story of Zacchaeus.
St. Nicholas Antioch Cathedral is located at 355 State Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. It’s an Antiochian Orthodox Church made in the Gothic style.
The gospel tells of how Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector in the city of Jericho and a man of short stature but of pure faith, climbed a sycamore to see Jesus. When Zain finished reading, he made the sign of the cross, indicating the end of the gospel and the beginning of the teaching.
Zain first makes mention of the upcoming season of the church, Lent. The story of Zacchaeus’s climb up the tree, he jokes, is “a nice way to say he was short,” bringing a light tone to a more introspective story. Zacchaeus, he said, “desired to see God” and went to great lengths to witness Jesus in the crowd.
Zain invites the congregation to meditate and imagine themselves in a crowd longing to see something or someone. “He desired to see Christ so much.” He is urging the congregation to consider their desire to see Christ in their own lives. “Everything we want to do in this life begins with desire.”
Zain has notes in his hands, but mostly speaks unaided. He wants to make sure the parishioners are inspecting their own hearts, and prompts them with a question: “What do we really love and desire more than anything else?” He references a meme about people in the cold watching a football game and compares it to the struggle of making it to church, whether it’s the cold or being unable to find parking. He pauses. This invites the listener to take stock of their spiritual habits.
“Zacchaeus is an example, brothers and sisters, for all of us,” he says. References to “we” and “us” let the parishioner know that Zain struggles himself, despite being a priest.
“Imagine that if God said I want to come and eat in your home,” the priest says. He engages the imagination using the gospel story. “We have to let Him in, and it begins with desire.” Zain refers to the idea of God living in people versus having worldly desires that push Him away. Worldly desires, he says, are “those things [that] fill our hearts and there’s no room for Christ.” He pauses again, providing a moment for the parishioner to examine their hearts. He moves onto this idea of cleansing oneself to make room for Christ, and that it begins with desire. He glances at his notes and references Revelation, “Behold I stand at the door and knock.” Christ is the one who knocks at the door in our hearts.
Zain’s voice grows louder to emphasize, “Today salvation has come to this house.” Zain wants his congregation to realize they can only respond to Christ when their desires are pure. Then we can hear His knocking on our hearts. He sends by saying, “Let us take this lesson with Zacchaeus and ask ourselves ‘what is our desire?’ That we may one day be worthy of the kingdom.” He ends with the sign of the cross, and the congregation does the same.
Becoming an Adult at Temple Emanu-El
NEW YORK - “We are on the corner of Fifth and 65 Street in 2024. But now, we are going back to Mount Sinai,” Rabbi Sarah Reines said from the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El during a Shabbat service.
For at Mount Sinai, said Reines, Moses received a sacred scroll that would be passed down through the generations.
This was the cue for 13-year-old Gavin Matlin, who up until this point had been sitting in a chair to the right of the ark, wearing a suit and a tallit, his feet dangling a few inches above the floor. Gavin stood and moved to the front of the bimah.
Reines pulled open the doors of the ark and retrieved the Torah while Gavin’s family — his sister, parents and grandparents, all dressed in trim black suits and dresses — ascended the stairs to the bimah and lined up next to him.
“This is the Torah, a light for our eyes, a lamp for our way,” sang the congregation.
“Our ancestors roamed that desert so many thousands of years ago and they were given this great gift,” Reines said, carrying the Torah scrolls wrapped in a mantle of red velvet with gold tassels. “And you are all here now because someone in your family line loved Judaism and loved their children enough to pass on this gift. Gavin, now it comes to you.”
Reines presented the Torah to Gavin’s grandfather, who, in a sign of veneration, extended a hand to grasp the velvet mantle. Reines stepped forward to the boy’s grandmother, who did the same. The rabbi walked down the line of family, pausing so that each member could touch the Torah.
And so, from generation to generation, the Torah was handed down to Gavin on his Bar Mitzvah.
When the scrolls reached Gavin, he seemed to take in the weight of all that was wrapped in the mantle before him — physically, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are contained in the scrolls, but in a broader sense, Jewish law and tradition and Matlin’s responsibility to the Jewish community are also there.
After a moment’s pause, he reached out to touch the mantle, before turning and springing toward his sister in a hug.
The boy, a boy no longer in Jewish eyes, embraced each member of his family and walked side by side with Reines to the pulpit, where he read a Torah portion from the Book of Exodus and gave a short speech. Reines then welcomed him as an adult member of the congregation.