Reflecting on a quick trip to London, Alan Jacobs points up a sad and common dissonance in Anglican life (to which we can only say, "Behold the harmony which is the Church of the Holy Communion!"):

Great St. Bart's remains, as Iain Sinclair has said, the most numinous of London's churches.

 

The current rector seems to be Anglo-Catholic in sympathies: I smelled incense as I came in the door, and noted some classes to be offered in the thought of John Henry Newman. And yet I saw also an assertive notice proclaiming that, whatever other churches might do, this one offers Communion to anyone who wants it, regardless of baptism or belief—something that would have horrified Newman, who believed that, as some theologians have put it, that Communion is the sacrament of the reconciled, but Baptism must come before as the sacrament of reconciliation itself. Aesthetic Anglo-Catholicism needs to be distinguished from doctrinal Anglo-Catholicism, I think.

 

A little later, walking east along London Wall, I noted the odd solitary tower of St. Alban's—a Christopher Wren church otherwise destroyed, sitting incongruously in the middle of a street—and then the blank brick flank of All Hallows-on-the-Wall. Turning down Bishopsgate I passed, almost without seeing it, the shy façade of St. Ethelburga's, flush with the surrounding office buildings: it's not a parish church anymore, after a 1993 IRA bomb nearly destroyed it, but houses the St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. Then I crossed a building site, rounded a corner, and came up on St. Helen's—which is unseeable to any such walker for a moment, thanks to the great looming bulk of the Gherkin just behind it.

 

But when you go in, you discern a beautiful space, not quite as old as Great St. Bart's but 13th century, and yet utterly different in aspect and atmosphere. To some extent this results from the large clear windows, some of which were installed after the IRA bomb that devastated St. Ethelburga's and much of Bishopsgate shattered the ancient stained glass. The restoration that followed seemed bent on transforming this Gothic structure into a Wren-style auditory church. The space is open and strongly lit—it seems a place for listening to sermons and taking notes in your Bible, which is quite fitting when you consider the strongly evangelical character of the congregation today.

 

There's no parish in London more dynamic than St. Helen's: any time you walk in—as you know from experience, Brett—the devotion and zeal are palpable. In St. Helen's I automatically smile. Visit on a weekday morning and you're likely to find people wheeling in bag lunches and placing Bibles in the stackable chairs in preparation for lunchtime Bible studies (heavily attended by workers in this financial district). It's great.

 

And yet there's something just a little odd about it: the drum kit and amplifiers next to the 17th-century pulpit, the folding tables and styrofoam cups set up around the great marble monuments to the distinguished dead of the City … the space seems just a space, somewhere to meet and praise. If the very stones of Great St. Bart's feel numinous, those of St. Helen's feel just functional, as though an old hall or gymnasium would serve the purpose just as well. Which of course they would: the people of God can find his presence anywhere, and the vibrancy of worship at St. Helen's is immensely attractive. But I'm still trying to account for my feelings of dissonance.

 

In any event, when I think about our recent trip, this polarity—Great St. Bart's at one end of the City and of my walk, St. Helen's at the other—comes first to my mind.

Here's the whole thing.