A Personal Journey into St. Stephen’s

Readers have commented about the “you are there” approach to my posts on what’s visible within St. Stephen’s. Their subjects, I hoped, might come alive as you read about them. And if/when you visited, the church might possibly come even more to life with that encounter.

A defining part of that life is, for me, St. Stephen’s strong sense of Place.

By Place, I mean a physical world with a unique personality that’s beyond planned design. It’s drawn partly from a lived experience within a particular setting (neighborhood)), all wounds and glories acquired with time and engagement shaping it along the way. And that Place is still alive, engaged, growing.

 This definition probably says a lot about me. How to investigate?  Though very unusual for me in my professional role, I will tell you about an eerily seamless meshing of my personal and scholarly reactions to St. Stephen’s.

The story begins with what I know about myself. As a child, I knew I responded to physical space and material stuff with my full self: viscerally, with all my senses, emotionally, intellectually, intuitively, as I moved about. Physical qualities varied enormously but always had impact; always seemed to say something somehow. Where these ingredients fit within a broader human space (a neighborhood, for example) and what human activities took place within the space formed part of a potent whole.

Those interests led me to commit, as an adult, to three-dimensional, socially engaged physical art. Following an undergraduate major in sculpture, I eventually took a PHD in art history, with a specialty in French art, history, and culture and a particularly charged sub-field, funerary sculpture and cult.

My broadest concern, however, was for how material forms and space act and ”speak” together; how “beauty,” material presence, contributes to experience there; how an individual or community interacts with these physical settings at a particular moment, especially in ritual form. I pursued these questions in various ways over thirty years split between university teaching (mostly at the University of Pennsylvania) and curatorial work (mostly at the National Gallery of Art). At the end I went deeper into funerary arts. After several publications on related French issues, I turned to study of 19th century American tombs.

In that pursuit, in 2013 I found St. Stephen’s, an Episcopal church I’d never known though it was only 12 blocks from home.

I was struck by its unusual façade and its forceful presence on a busy urban artery between the Convention Center and the Jefferson Health main campus. Because of its apparent street engagement, the locked church doors that we find almost everywhere . . . jarred.

Gaining access to within those closed doors metaphorically opened all sorts of new ones for me. Though I’d planned only to examine the Burd monuments, which were unique and took me along a fascinating course, I was drawn to sit and absorb the space.

Churches don’t always call me that way; I’d been in many by then throughout Europe. This one, though worn like many older churches and evidently failing as a congregation, was mysteriously graceful, embracing. The arts professional in me could identify elements of the building’s sense of intimacy: its compact footprint (partly from its chopped-up urban block), the ceiling heights, the cropped gallery that sheltered upon entry and then, anthropomorphically, created arms that gently hugged since it no longer disappeared into the east wall (See Fig. 1). But accepting? Where did that come from? What I saw fit no formula I knew.

That warm welcome emerged despite the richness of its teaching and ritual elements: stained glass windows, memorials, and an eye-poppingly elegant chancel. Tinted daylight within was strangely soothing despite the power of the radiant, colorful figural windows. The more I looked, the more I realized how “wow” the individual pieces were. Yet together there was a quiet harmony of manifestly unlike parts, a quiet tact. Despite all the looming pictorial ”homilies,” I was given unexpected “space,” not oppressed by heavy rhetoric, artistic magnificence, or vanity. This interior, where I sat alone, also emanated something quietly sacred. I welcomed it though I’d left organized worship (a Roman Catholic turned Anglican as a teenager) to find my richest interaction with the divine on streams, in unexpected spaces, or with people. I sat, eased, in St. Stephen’s, a vulnerable human rather than the analytical art historian. I confronted my feelings about the streets just outside that teemed with the needy who as ever grabbed my heart, about my failing mother and distraught younger sisters.

My essay on the church, with the Burd canopy tomb as its centerpiece, was published in Yale ‘s MAVCOR Journal in 2017 as St. Stephen’s destiny shifted. Curious about the church’s new chapter, I talked at length with the new team charged with renewing the church, headed by Fr. Peter Kountz who asked me aboard as St. Stephen’s consulting historian and curator.  I accepted, opening a nontraditional professional chapter with a church now on a nontraditional trajectory. It was a fertile direction for me, given all that it merged.

In the course of my work, some of which I’ve posted, what I discovered about individual elements of this unconventional church never compromised that first feeling of gentle embrace. The unfolding history of the building, congregation, and its activities added presences, experiences. The uncovered dark episodes, flaws, and spectrum of humanity coexisted with the positive within this lived and livable space, however artful. My teammates felt it too; so did certain visitors with radically different backgrounds and visions. Together, we were learning about, and finding ways to articulate, an uncanny sense of Place at St. Stephen’s.

There was, however, a beginning, fresh and startling. In his consecration sermon for St. Stephen’s in 1823, the formidable Bishop of New York, The Rt Revd John Henry Hobart, applauded the “splendid yet chaste ornaments of this sacred temple” as a virtuous modern American response to his ideal: Gothic churches, for him “unrivalled monuments of beauty and grandeur.” St. Stephen’s fit its given purpose: “worship of the High Holy Being” with “feelings of awful and reverential, yet lively and cheerful devotion.” A disarming mix of devotional standards in a startling mix of architectural qualities (splendid yet chaste?) at the church’s birth—by the codifier of the Episcopal High Church!

St. Stephen’s perceived evocation of the Gothic has since careened from “perfect” to “misunderstood.” Today, there’s a lot new to say about it (including which Gothic). Since the 1820s the church’s reputation as a local architectural and artistic treasure skyrocketed. It had gained so many remarkable architectural and memorial elements by the twentieth century that it earned the moniker “Philadelphia’s Westminster Abbey”—given apparently by its rector The Rev. Carl E. Grammer (1905-1936).

This later history is remarkable for another very important reason. The last phase of the church’s material enrichment, an aesthetic traditionally associated with High Church values, was directed by liberal, even evangelical rectors.

With all its ups and downs, multiple near-death and revival episodes, this unique place has flourished with—and has provided a dramatic, versatile space for—different religious views, different programs, through wars, national and local upheaval for almost two centuries. The traces of this experience are everywhere, the fuller stories often in our archives and outside documents.

Is St. Stephen’s a remarkable relic, grandeur felled by pride, by obsolescence? All signs suggest it’s a lived Place that invites yet more living in new ways. I believe the views of St. Stephen’s ever-quotable rector, The Rev. Alfred W. Price, given at the church’s 135th anniversary in 1958, apply to Now: “ . . . if a place has nothing but a past . . . it is a museum! If a place has nothing but the present, how very thin and shallow that present can be. If a place has nothing but the future, it is nothing but an optimistic dream! Happy is the place that has a great past, and a great present, and a great future!”

Come and see. Check it out in ritual mode on Ash Wednesday, which is next week!

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian