|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
[Back to index of July/August 2007 articles] Foundation of faith By Lucy Chumbley “One hundred years ago, in 1907, a visionary group of Anglicans/Episcopalians began to fulfill a dream that had begun 100 years before that,” said Dean Samuel T. Lloyd: “Building a spiritual home in our nation’s capital.” That dream, now cast in stone and stained glass, is the towering Gothic edifice that is Washington National Cathedral, he said, kicking off the centennial celebrations by opening an exhibit, “Dreamers and Believers,” devoted to those distant visionaries. It took 83 years from the day the foundation stone was set, Sept. 29, 1907, until the cathedral – now the sixth largest in the world – was completed, Lloyd said. During those years, many thousands contributed to its creation. From children in far-away parishes who filled mite boxes with pennies to major benefactors and fund raisers, from construction crews to architects and artists of all kinds, making the dream concrete was a massive community effort. “They had a vision which was for their time radical,” Lloyd said. “There was a real vision that this was the Episcopal Church’s gift to the nation.” The exhibit, which is housed in the cathedral’s Rare Book Library, will be open to the public through October 2008. Photographs, blueprints, letters and mementos chart the cathedral’s construction, but the human stories they reveal give the exhibit an extra dimension. “This is a story of people,” said centennial director Julie Cooke. “It was just wonderful to uncover these stories and share them with people.” Gems from the exhibit include the words of a stone worker, who felt protected by God as he worked high on the scaffolding, and a coded prayer written in the Bethlehem Chapel’s guest register in 1914. Its author, Philip Hubert Frohman, asked that he would someday become the project’s architect. And seven years later, he did. The exhibition’s opening is the first centennial event, and celebrations will continue into 2008 with a variety of special events, said centennial program coordinator Debra Duff. An expanded Cathedral Day this Sept. 29 will feature a reenactment of the laying of the foundation stone, Duff said. There also will be reunions the day before and after of former choristers, staff, stone masons and others who helped build or serve the cathedral, culminating with a festival worship service at 11:15 a.m. Sept. 30. In September, a series of Celebrity Organ Concerts will begin. The concerts, set for 5 p.m. each Sunday (after Evensong), will continue through May 2008. And October will herald the launch of the Celebration of American Preaching, a year-long program featuring prominent guest preachers at the 11:15 a.m. Sunday services. A Centennial Gala is set for Nov. 9, during which Archbishop Desmond Tutu will be presented with the first ever Cathedral Prize. The gala, a black-tie dinner, is by invitation only (for more information, contact centennial@cathedral.org), but Tutu also will give a public presentation on the Spirituality of Reconciliation during his visit. The theme of reconciliation will continue in 2008 with the Racial Reconciliation and Justice Week, March 30 through April 6. This will include a series of events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, delivered at the cathedral five days before his assassination. The celebrations will end with a Centennial Summer Festival from June 13 through July 4, 2008, honoring 100 years of cathedral music and five decades of Summer Music Festivals. For details of these and other centennial events, visit www.cathedral.org. Many things have changed on Mount St. Alban since the day, almost 100 years ago, when a crowd of 30,000 joined Bishop Henry Yates Satterlee and President Theodore Roosevelt to lay the cathedral’s foundation stone. Today, after years of toil, the bricks and mortar are all in place, Lloyd said, but the cathedral still has work to do. Sharing the cathedral’s vision for the future, he described the guiding principles set out in a recent report, A New Century, A New Calling: To be a voice of generous-spirited Christianity; a place of reconciliation, where all faiths are welcome; and a people, working toward a just world. “It took a century to get the building built, and now we turn to a new century,” Lloyd said. “What can we do in it?” [Back to index of July/August 2007 articles]
|
|
||||||||||
