Composing a Further Life

movement.”
    I commented that issues of social justice had barely come up in his narrative until this point, and he nodded. “Not at all. Zero. This was the beginning of it. This is 1950. Then Paul Moore goes on to talk about the Gospel insistence on poverty and he tells the story of St. Martin of Tours, who was a Roman soldier, and the beggar calling to him from the side of the road. He hears the calling two or three times and doesn’t pay attention, and then he turns back and gets down from his horse and goes and wraps up the beggar. All of the iconography has him cutting his cloak in half with his sword and wrapping up the beggar. The beggar still says, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold,’ and so he wraps him up some more and tries to warm him up, and then ‘I’m cold, I’m cold,’ and he lies on top of the beggar and blows into his mouth and the beggar becomes Christ. That’s the story. And that’s what he told.
    “Well, that was not what we were expecting. It was very—It stuck. Then he just talked about the tremendous poverty of Jersey City and his ministry there. I really was smitten by what he said, though I didn’t actually meet him. So I went over and took a couple of courses at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, and in the end I did two years’ worth of courses at EDS for Harvard credit and meanwhile was doing heavy history of architecture with John Coolidge.
    “Come senior year, Coolidge says, ‘You have to at least do a senior thesis. Do you know what you’d like to do it on?’ I had discovered that Germany in the twenties had the first modern church architecture in the world, so I came back and said I would like to work on that.… The great architect of the twenties in Germany who did the modern churches was a guy by the name of Dominikus Böhm, and he did wonderful parabolic stuff in concrete—it was fabulous. And there were two or three other architects.
    “That was also the beginning of the modern liturgical movement, led by the Benedictines in Germany, so it became critical to make my thesis about the impact of this nascent liturgical movement in the Catholic Church on these modern architects. My thesis was a two-volume thing, and the second volume was all photographs, so it was very concrete. Well, the thesis was a hit, and I got a summa on it.
    “So I got a call from the chairman of the department, saying, ‘We’re really very impressed with what you’ve done, and there are two Harvard-Cambridge fellowships and we would like to propose you for one of those through the Department of Fine Arts.’ Lovely. And I won it. A fellowship to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was my senior year, two months before graduation.
    “But—this is important, because this was the moment when I was finishing my thesis—I was reading and reflecting on a book called
Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna
, by Otto G. von Simson, that came out in 1948…. The marriage of liturgy and architecture and mosaic was what that whole book was about. I remember reflecting on that as I was completing my thesis, and then whammo! I said, I could be a priest
and
an architect. I could be a
worker
priest! Then two weeks later I got this fellowship to Cambridge, which had architecture and of course a very important school of theology. When I graduated from Harvard, I went for the summer to the University of Marburg in Germany to learn German and to visit the churches that I wrote my thesis about.
    “The day before I sailed, though, I went out to Jersey City for the first time. The Jersey City Ministry was started by three guys who’d gone to General Seminary, including Paul Moore, and a small group of Episcopal Sisters of Saint John the Baptist. And they were at this old church that was sort of down to seven old white ladies in a neighborhood that had become increasingly black, as had the city. So out I go to see this. Paul isn’t there, but I meet one of his colleagues and I spend the afternoon, kids all over the place in the church. The open rectory was the symbol of that whole ministry. And then the next day I go to Germany—Marburg.
    “At the end of the two-month language course, four of us decided to tour Germany together, and one of the guys had a jeep. And so we went around and I saw my churches and went to Vienna, and I went and stayed overnight with Dominikus Böhm, the great architect about whom I had written my thesis, and Rudolf Schwarz, and met them all in Cologne, and so