Composing a Further Life

tried to combine multiple commitments in ways that are not only workable but graceful. For Jim, the medieval cathedral was not a narrowly religious institution but reflected all the activities of the world around it—politics, economics, learning, and the arts—combined in a unified vision that gave meaning to life. I use the metaphor of composing in a second way as well, as musical compositions move through time, changing tempo and shifting themes, yet maintaining threads of continuity across multiple orchestral movements. For Jim, it seemed to me, the way a contemporary cathedral must address continuity across time is to find and affirm the threads that connect tradition to visions of the future.
    “In architectural history, I really got to know the role that cathedrals played in the Middle Ages, and that to me was a fascinating thing,” he said. “The cathedrals really started with the Silk Road and the beginnings of secure cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Europe was really rural in the Dark Ages; cities dwindled, and everybody lived in villages.… So when the new cities started growing, the cathedral was sized to be the center of the city. Cathedrals grew to be the centers of compassion and of culture. The arts, the intellect, politics. All that stuff.
    “Now that holistic notion was what interested me. And also the notion of … here was this big monster cathedral, which had totally gone down in people coming to it.”
    Both Jim’s experiences as a student and his early assignments seemed to link his priesthood with the city. The ritual life of a cathedral necessarily evokes attention to performance, which had also been an important part of his growing up, but I asked how that all flowed together with architecture and design. “Well, it doesn’t—it really doesn’t flow,” he said, “but it explodes when I come to the cathedral, because that is the opportunity to be architect, complete the cathedral, make the cathedral the center of the city, the center of urban renewal”—he circled his hand—“and it’s also there that I recognize that the city is not all Episcopalian and not all Christian. This notion of a cathedral—think of those windows—it’s a cosmic notion. It’s to hold an entire people.… My whole interfaith thing starts there—it wasn’t part of Chicago at all.”
    I grinned. “You mean you weren’t even an ecumenical Christian when you went to Chicago?”
    “Oh, I was very ecumenical, but I was very Christian. That’s what turned around with St. John the Divine. From the day I arrived, I realized the cathedral had to function on many different fronts. The social justice stuff really came out of Jersey City. It took the civil rights movement thing to blow that open. And the interfaith thing didn’t develop until I came to the cathedral—I decided this is for the whole world.”
    During the twenty-five years that James Morton was dean of St. John the Divine, each of the themes that had become important in his earlier life was woven into the life of the cathedral. It became a center for the arts in New York City, a center for interdisciplinary scholarship, and a center for social action. Chapels along the nave were dedicated to poetry, to the environment, and to victims of the AIDS epidemic. Topical sermons were preached by poets and politicians, UN delegates and community organizers, Sufis and Buddhists, even anthropologists like myself. Work on the building, which had been halted in 1941, when the United States entered World War II, was resumed as a job training program for unemployed youth working with and learning from master stonecutters from England. There was a school and a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen. Children brought their pets to be blessed on the feast of St. Francis, and large animals—camels and even a small elephant—were included in processions. Waves of excitement and sometimes of disapproval surrounded St. John’s—some people found it too inclusive or too daring—and cathedral events were covered by
The New York Times
.
    As we spoke, I realized that even before Jim came to New York, the social issues being addressed in Chicago were beginning to be understood in global terms—that, as René Dubos urged that year at the UN Conference on the Environment, acting locally requires thinking globally. Jim had described a shift at the Urban Training Center during his last year to discussions of “white racism,” and until I could