WE’RE TWO CENTURIES OLD! Contemplating who we are through our physical church
While we pondered our looming bicentennial, we experienced an epiphany: We found photographs of the church’s east windows in our database, taken recently by a generous visitor, that now help us see and think about St. Stephen’s in new ways.
St. Stephen’s in 1823
That discovery deserved its own space, so we featured it as the autumn’s first Friday post last week (October 21). Yet the thinking it generated also crystallized our approach to the coming months, with St. Stephen’s 200th anniversary added to the liturgical seasons so important to the Christian communion, Advent and Christmas. Each will receive its due.
Our recent response to the donated photographs taught us that this period just before we honor the building’s consecration (February 27, 1823) offers a great opportunity to explore who and where we are, using the physical church. With online posts, we can share this journey with our virtual community.
We’ll call these the Friday Anniversary posts. Instead of the broad-ranging inquiry of the Friday Reflections, this commemorative series turns inward, seeking to better understand our mission through place and time.
St. Stephen’s Today
Beginning with its design, the physical St. Stephen’s sought the ideal for most sacred spaces in being an eloquent, interactive material presence that links humanity with the divine and its members together across time. The entire physical church participates in this presence. The east windows may dominate, but they complement all else in the church, becoming one of the church’s several material “voices” about its identity, mission, and evolution: they’re the third set of windows in the fifth chancel design.
These Friday Anniversary posts will appear on the second Friday of each month until February. I’ll undertake them alone; what better way for the historian to think about the long and challenging path through time?
I’ll open with the vision of the physical church articulated at St. Stephen’s consecration in 1823. Subsequent topics on currently visible features of the church will vary but will pivot on one overarching selective theme: connection and continuity across radically changing society and time. That theme underpins the church’s current dual focus as a sacred space for worship and caring for the soul, with burgeoning forms of community engagement. Throughout, we are fellow pilgrims on a shared path. As a physical church, St. Stephen’s is, as it has been, committed to enabling that journey.
— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator