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TEXAS CELEBRATED WASHINGTON – The people of Texas were celebrated at an April 22 worship service at Washington National Cathedral where major speakers delivered Earth Day calls to action to save the planet. The event drew 1,779 worshipers to the Cathedral’s 11 am service, including 450 visitors from Texas and natives of the state who now live in the Washington area. People from the Lone Star State played major roles including reading Scripture and delivering gifts to the altar during the service offertory. The Cathedral, which has hosted state funerals and other events of national significance, focuses on an individual state one Sunday each month, inviting church and civic leaders and worshipers of all faiths to raise their communities in prayer at the 11 am service. Later in the day, the Dallas Baptist University Chorale performed at a special Evensong service dedicated to the students and faculty of Virginia Tech, where a gunman killed 32 people on April 16. With Earth Day falling on the same date, the 11 am Texas service took on a decidedly “green” tint. Marchers in the grand opening procession waved 25-foot high streamers of blue, green and yellow—earth and sea colors—while speakers focused on the social and spiritual implications of shielding the planet from further harm from greenhouse gases. The Rev. Richard Cizik, a prominent environmental advocate among American religious leaders, offered a prayer for the earth and man’s care of it. “Sustaining God, you visit the land and prepare the grain providing for the earth and all its inhabitants,” Cizik prayed. “As we consider the lilies of the field and the whole of creation, the earth and the heavens formed by your gracious hand, make our hearts grateful for that which you have entrusted to our care, that we may steward your abundance with wisdom and compassion.” Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, said after the event that the Cathedral’s service sent a message of the broadening concern about threats to the earth. “This was a service that reflects the diversity of this movement,” Cizik said. “Yes, it includes leaders such as those at the Cathedral but this service, by including evangelicals and ironically the Texans, it sends an important message nationally that we are all in this together. “It is all of us together singing on the same songsheet saying this is God’s earth and he owns it and we are his servants and we have to do this together.” “The environmental movement has cautioned the nation and others for years, God bless them, but it has not been until the religious community began to speak of this that the American people began to listen,” Cizik said. The Right Rev. C. Wallis Ohl, Episcopal bishop of Northwest Texas, presided at the service. Ohl said concern is growing about the earth and its resources. “People are starting to wake up,” Ohl said. “We who live in the dry southwest have known for all my life that water is not only precious but scarce.” Ohl, who is from Lubbock, noted the Ogallala Aquifer continues to be drawn down as water is diverted to growing cotton. “In our part of Texas, we are reaching a point where that is going to have to come to an end or we are not going to have water to drink.” Ohl saw another broad purpose to the Cathedral service. By gathering together, “we gain a sense of community, a common witness of worship,” he said. “We all gather to recognize the presence of God in our lives and to know that, as St. Paul says, neither death nor life nor principalities nor powers, nothing can separate us from the love of God. That’s the only way we can make sense out of Iraq, out of Blacksburg, Virginia, out of any tragedy.” The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III , Dean of Washington National Cathedral, welcomed the Texans and delivered the sermon, which also focused on Earth Day. Lloyd said it will take a major public, government and political mobilization to save the planet, on par with the U.S. effort to win World War II, or the drive to put a man on the moon. Citing author Bill McKibben, Lloyd said, “If you care about social justice, this is the biggest battle we have ever faced.” “The earth is the Lord’s and we are called on to be its stewards, to care for it lovingly and pass it on no worse than we found it,” he said. “Are we as a nation and world capable of that? I don’t know but I worry. “I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren how we sat by, too addicted to our comfortable American life, to change our way of living before disaster strikes. I believe we are being called here now in how we live, act, vote, to protect the earth.” Texas visitors played key roles throughout the service, most notably 95 members of a special choir that was assembled specifically to perform a choral prelude. Choir leaders from the sprawling Diocese of Texas recruited adults and young singers from more than a dozen churches. Half the group rehearsed in Houston, the other half in Austin through the early spring. When everyone arrived in Washington over the weekend, they rehearsed together just once on Saturday. “It was strange to start out with, but it came together very well,” said Mike Mason, organist and choirmaster of Church of the Good Shepherd in Tomball. On Sunday, the choir formally introduced a 30-minute program of anthems and hymns that highlighted arrangements from contemporary Texas composers Robert H. Young and David Ashley White that drew warm applause and praise. “It went amazingly well. Thank you God, thank you choir, thank you conductors,” said Linda Patterson, chairwoman of the Diocese of Texas music commission who organized the group. The choir was led by two conductors: Julia Hall of Houston and Dr. David Stevens of Austin. “It was a pinnacle experience for Episcopal musicians,” Hall said. Conducting the singers, Hall’s back was to the audience for most of the performance, but then she turned around at the end and, she declared, “the Cathedral was full all the way to the back! “Oh yeah, I would do this again,” Hall said A number of other Texans played important parts. Carmen Terry, a native of White Deer and a board member of the Texas State Society of Washington, read Scripture. Dorothy Knox Houghton, a National Cathedral Association regional volunteer leader from Houston, along with Nancy Hibbs of San Antonio and former Dallas natives, now Washington area residents, Harry and Gay Glenos, who recently joined the Cathedral’s regular worshiping community, delivered gifts to the altar during the Offertory. Six acolytes from St. Francis by the Lake Episcopal Church, of Canyon Lake, carried food baskets to the altar. They were Cary Stanley, 9; Devon Rodgers, 9; Stephanie Van Meter, 11; Lizzie Leigh, 8, Tristan Ross, 11; and Michelle Van Meter, 12. Capt. Michael Stepp, a Houston native on active duty at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, carried the Texas flag in the opening procession. Stepp is an operating room nurse attached to the 5010th U.S. Army Hospital The state flag was placed on the chancel steps, and was to remain there for a week in further recognition of Texas. Children and young people representing dozens of communities in Texas marched in the grand opening procession, carrying colorful banners denoting their home churches. Churches represented included Church of the Advent, Brownsville; Church of the Good Shepherd, Austin; St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Wimberley; Christ Church, Laredo; St. John’s Episcopal Church, New Braunfels; St. Francis of Assisi, Prairie View; St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Houston; Church of the Good Shepherd, Tomball; St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Palestine; Trinity Church, Galveston; St. Francis by the Lake, Canyon Lake; St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, San Antonio. Afterwards guides led cathedral tours highlighting references to Texas, such as the iron gates between the north and south crypt aisles that were designed and fabricated by Voss Metal Works of San Antonio.
ATTN PRINT MEDIA: If you desire e-mail transmission of this account and/or photos sent as JPEG attachments please contact Elizabeth Mullen at the number above. Available on the web site are print-quality photos of Washington National Cathedral (’Photos for Print” under ’News” at www.cathedral.org/cathedral). | |