On the Steps of St. Thomas, 5th Avenue

Inside the church, the liturgy is timeless and uniform yet resonant. Voices in perfect pitch reflect from the high ceiling–impossibly held up by stone–and surround everyone in the creaking wooden pews.

We’re just a little late to the service. As we quietly walk down the aisle trying to find seats we can access without disturbing anyone any more than we already have, we pass all manner of people. Urban dwellers from uptown are seated in their regular seats for the evensong service on the eve of the Second day of Advent. Tourists are sitting next to their shopping bags. The curious are leafing through the prayer book and the handout. The awestruck are staring at the vaulted ceilings or the towering reredos, one of the largest in the world.

In this sacred space, countless souls have worshiped, sought refuge, answers, and above all, meaning. The flow of voices raised and voices whispered, the flood of thoughts turned heavenward in this place are near infinite. For a single moment, fleeting in comparison, my thoughts contribute to this nearly perpetual hymn.

As many others here are, I’m swallowed whole by the immense space around me. It reminds me how small and insignificant I am: my body cannot fill but a portion of a seat, my mind cannot fill but a fraction of this collective consciousness. This place is a monument to mankind’s yearning to understand our place in the world. It is for something. It has a purpose. That purpose is to pull the incorporeal into our world, to connect mankind with the infinity that is God, to find order in the chaos of existence.

Everyone who has slid off 5th Avenue all throughout the service has left behind a frenetic world and entered a world of expansive order. But this bubble of order exists fully seated in the vibrant chaos. Beneath our feet, the rumble of the subway can be felt, reminding us that while we pause, the world continues without us.

As the service ends, we all make our way to the exits and move from this stone and wood chamber into Manhattan. But standing on the steps of St. Thomas, between the world of inward contemplation and the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of the sidewalk, I stand with a foot in both places. I stand in a spot where countless have stood before me and countless will stand after me.

The dim lighting of St. Thomas blends into the street lights and headlamps of 5th Avenue. As the flood of people rushes by with so many varied life experiences, at once completely unlike my own and yet wholly shared, I see my immortality.  Just standing on these steps is an act of immortality.  I cannot stand where I am without the benefit of an unfathomable chain of events, linking me to the stoneworkers who built these steps, to the ironworker who crafted this handrail, to the priests who perpetuate the Church, to my parents and ancestors who bore me, to the bacteria who share my gut and sustain my life, to the plants I eat, to the very DNA that instructs the construction of my hands and brain.

I stand at the edge of this stream of people on Fifth Avenue who are sculpted by all that came before them and changed by all that is around them; by me. Every decision, known and unknown, changes the outcome and ripples its effects across the universe, creating an indelible mark.  The signal may attenuate or find magnifying constructive interference, but it propagates forever.

The spirit of God hovers above the sidewalks, turning chaos into form into chaos.

I am but one participant in an infinite awareness of the world, endowed with the gift of consciousness, of forethought, memory, and imagination. I am able to internalize the very cosmos–to shrink the universe into a space the size of my head, and yet able to conceptualize its infinite and indomitable size. I am the cosmos, made of the same substance as stars and as dung beetles. Yet in this miracle of being, I am utterly common and quotidian, walking down Fifth Avenue to 50th street to see the tree at Rockefeller Plaza.