October 2014 - The Church of St. John The Evangelist

eng raving William Hogarth, The Sleeping Congregation (1736), courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, bequeathed by Rev. Alexander Dyce.
First Parishioner Issue • october 2014
THE CHURCH OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST
The newsletter of
Montreal, Quebec
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The Evangelist
october 2014
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liturgical & musical notes
THE USE
OF HYMNS
My mother church has a memory deficit
Fr Ezra Pickup
T
his September will mark the Seventeenth Anniversary of my return
to St John’s. The joyful “coming back
home”, so to speak, was marred by an obvious
difference from what I had expected. It was
the seeming amnesia of the rich hymn-singing tradition of the Parish during the 1950s.
That was still present when I served Fr Slattery during much of 1982–1984. My old
Choir Hymnal is testimony to that tradition. I wondered, “How could this be?”
During the previous 37 years in the
Priesthood, during which I served mostly
in small town, rural, and inner-city parishes,
and two diocesan institutions, the congregations all got to know all the hymns and
could sing between 350 and 425 of these
hymns. The latter number occurred following the adoption of the new Eucharistic
Lectionary.
I asked Peter Hawkins, the organist at
the time of my return, about the narrow
choice of Hymns. His response was that few
Hymns used in 1997 had been the tradition
when he began. As one might expect, I got a
similar response from all the Organists who
followed.
I must say that it’s hard enough for me to
bear during the late September through mid
June ‘Choir Year’, when the hymns often do
not correspond either to the readings, the
theme of the Sunday nor season.The hymns
are always repeated more than they need
be. It is sad that the wonderful eucharistic
hymns it seems are rarely used any more
But when the Summer Season arrives,
I almost feel like “resigning” until late September, so I won’t have to put up with the
frequent repetition of good hymns, and/or,
especially, those that are less-than-inspiring.
In short, my joy at returning to my
“Mother” Church, has been tempered by discovering that she has had a long-term memory deficit, which I hope can be corrected to
benefit her and all her children.
If there were any call for it, I would even
be willing to lead “Exploring Hymns” sessions after church on Sundays. 4
Bologna. A view of the city (Basilica of St. Petronio in the middle) from La Torre deli Asinelli.
reports from all over
THE GOLDEN
DÜBENORGEL OF
STOCKHOLM
From the summer diary of a concert organist
T
Federico Andreoni
his summer I spent four beautiful
weeks traveling through Europe. At
the end of June, I left Montreal for
Paris; a short flight across the ocean took
me to the beautiful French capital, where I
enjoyed seeing old friends and making new
ones, visiting arrondissements and monuments I had not yet seen, and tasting some
excellent wines and delicious food in local
restaurants and cafés.
A week later, with two friends, I left Paris
for Luxembourg, where I played a concert
on the beautiful instrument at St. Michael’s
Church. The great Batalla Imperial sounded
astounding on that instrument, with the
trumpets blasting throughout the nave and
the scary effect of the French tremblant fort
mimicking the ground shaking under the
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The Evangelist
october 2014
Padua & ferrara. (left) Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, interior. (right) Ferrara, Cathedral
museum. Jacopo della Quercia. Madonna della melagrana (Madonna of the pomegranate), 1403–1406.
Bologna. Basilica of St. Petronio, Lorenzo da Prato organ, 1475.
charge of the horses’ feet! After the concert,
time to relax for a few days, between an early
morning run in the city’s largest park (in
fact, a small valley right outside of town), a
walk around the city walls, visits to the local
attractions, and, as always, some fine food
and wine, which, in Luxembourg, are very
much in the French tradition.
A quick flight North, passing through
some spectacular fjords, and I found myself
in Stockholm. This was my second trip to
Stockholm, and the “Venice of the North”
seemed particularly charming this time,
with its beautiful pastel-color buildings, the
ancient town, and the numerous large canals.
Thanks to the invitation of a dear friend,
Michael Dierks, Kantor (Music Director) of
the German Church and former McGill University Doctoral student, I played a concert
on the Dübenorgel of the German Church, a
world famous North German Baroque style
instrument of rare beauty. The case of the
organ, entirely covered in gold leaf, provides
not only a beautiful visual spectacle, but also
maximizes the brightness of the timid sunlight within the church’s walls, helping to
illuminate the church’s interior, especially
during the long dark Swedish winter.
From Scandinavia to the South. I flew
across Europe towards Italy on a very cloudy
and rainy day. Crossing the Alps, I recognized, covered in sprouts of snow and ominous thick gray clouds, some of the mountains where I used to spend my summer
vacations as a child. Once landed, Italy and
Italians appeared very familiar and welcoming. I travelled by train throughout the
North East, visiting friends in Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, Padova, and Venezia, enjoying
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churches and monuments, eating some fine
food and drinking delicious local wine, and
as always, having tons of ice cream. Finally, I
settled for a few days in Milan to visit family and friends.
two beloved musicians
leaving St. John’s
¶ While in Europe, I received a message
from one of our basses, Brian MacMillan,
informing me that he had been offered, and
accepted, the prestigious position of head
librarian of the music library at the Uni-
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The Evangelist
october 2014
proposals & projects
THE MYSTERY
WORSHIPPER
p hoto of Brian (ri g ht ) by Janet Best
A suggestion for an edition
to the regular features of this periodical
sadly, departing. Beloved musicians Julie Pinsonneault (left) and Brian MacMillan (right)
Brian joined the St. John’s choir more than
a decade ago, and was a very valuable presence in our music programme. We will miss
Brian’s sense of humor and passion for musicals and opera, and wish him all the best for a
wonderful career and his new life in Ontario!
Another move. This summer our organ
scholar Julie Pinsonneault moved to France,
to continue her graduate studies in organ and
versity of Western Ontario in London, ON. musicology at the Tolouse conservatory and
The acceptance of this offers means that he university. Julie was an invaluable presence
will no longer be able to stay in Montreal and within our music programme. Dear Julie, ad
participate in the life of our choir and parish. maiora! 4
Brian leaves us for a prestigious
position at the University of Western
Ontario, Julie continues her organ
and musicology studies in
Tolouse, France.
T
Doug Dalton
he satirical website, Ship of Fools,
has a recurring item called Mystery
Worshipper. People who are visiting
other churches write in with their anonymous “reviews” of the service. This might be
fun for us to try locally. Many of our parishioners visit other churches when they travel.
I propose that they write a small review for
The Evangelist of the church they visited.
To start the ball rolling, here is a review of
the service that Michel Pilon and I attended in
Victoria, BC:
¶ Kieran Wilson kindly drove us to St.
Barnabas Church. This is not his parish, and
he had never been there for a Sunday High
Mass. The church is a medium-sized building that was relatively full. (I would say there
were about 75 people.) The Mass was celebrated by Bishop Hannen, sometime Bishop
of Caledonia and cousin to our own Archdeacon Hannen. He greeted us prior to the
service, dressed in a Benedictine habit. The
High Mass was eastward facing, with much
of the ritual we are used to. I believe the choir
was mostly or all volunteers, but they did a
good job of leading the hymns and the prop-
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ers. The propers were sung to the plainsong
tunes with which we are familiar at St. John’s.
Oddly, the gradual psalm was sung to Anglican Chant.
The sermon was excellent. I did not get
the preacher’s name, but he is an assistant
in the parish. He delivered a well-crafted
and thoughtful sermon on the feeding of
the 5,000 and the Compassion of Christ as
a model for us to follow.
The Mass was from the 1962 rite in the
BAS. It was basically the same as the BCP Mass
with a few annoying additions like an interruption of the Prayer of Consecration by the
congregation saying some inane exclamation. The bells and incense were very much
in evidence.
The Mystery Worshipper for The Ship of
Fools website always ends with two questions:
What made you feel most like you were in
Heaven?
I would say that I appreciated some
hymns from the New English Hymnal that
we don’t have in our book. For example, we
sang Be Thou My Vision. It made me wonder
if we shouldn’t start adding more hymns to
our bulletins from the New English Hymnal
or the Canadian Hymnal.
What made you feel like you were in, well,
The Other Place?
Nothing, really. The service was very reverent and beautiful.
Rating from 0 to 10, where 0 is Hell and 10
is High Mass at St. John’s: 8/10. 4
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The Evangelist
Comment
A BLIGHT ON
HUMANITY
On Religious Fanaticism
Garrfield Du Couturier-Nichol
T
his morning when I turned on the television to watch the morning news, I
was again shocked to see more people being massacred in the name of religion.
There doesn’t seem to be a day goes by without one group or another carrying out some
atrocity in the name of their religious deity.
As a ‘moderate’ Christian, I have always tried
to live in harmony with my fellow human
beings who believe and practice a religion
different from my own. As someone who
was brought up in a small country community where I saw that even among Christians
there was a small tension (Catholic versus
Protestant) I was appalled to see this presence among people who went to church on
Sunday and professed to be of the same ‘family’ (i.e. Christian). As I grew up and moved
to the city and saw the profusion of different
practices, I began to visit different churches
to try and understand why these tensions
existed. These same groups (Anglicans, Baptists, United, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc. )
had so much in common and although a few
different practices and beliefs were held they
were CHRISTIAN.
Later in life when I began travelling
for work reasons (international elections)
I had the opportunity to visit synagogues,
mosques, churches and cathedrals all over
the world, and took every opportunity to
worship in each, while respecting the particular tenets and beliefs of that country and
religion. For example in Jakarta, the Roman
Catholic basilica is directly across the street
from the world’s fifth largest mosque and I
prayed in both. A colleague at the time said
that he thought I was covering my bases just
in case! Several years ago, I became a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism and again have
had the chance to expand my experience
with others of different beliefs through dialogue and practice.
As a lecturer at McGill, I have got to know
Students of many different Religious back-
october 2014
grounds. I have had the pleasure and honour of sharing Passover with Jewish students,
Eid al Fitr with Muslim students and other
holidays with Buddhists and Bahai students.
All of these are peace loving and wonderful
human beings who like me, are shocked and
abhor violence against their fellow humans.
From the burning of the sacred Koran by
rabid Christian preachers, to the fire-bombing of Jewish synagogues, and the killing of
Christians while praying in Africa, these
show the side of mankind that God must
shake his head at when he sees these things
being done in HIS name. This morning when
I saw what is happening in Syria and Iraq, I
was appalled. I have many Muslim friends
who are not only embarrassed but angry at
what is being perpetrated in the name of
their religion. As I approach fourscore years,
my lifetime experience has taught me that
most people who are religious, are decent
loving, caring people who practice what I
have come to call the “loving” tenets on their
religion and are willing to share and discuss
them with others without trying to proselytise on its behalf.
Over the past thirty years, there has
seemed to have developed groups whose
religious fervor has become a “believe what
we believe or the consequences will not be
good”. I cannot in my farthest depths of conscience understand what drives people to
take this stand and carry out such actions in
the name of any deity. I heard a comedian a
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few years ago express it in a way that made
great sense to me. He said roughly that if a
person had a religion they believed in that
got them through a rough period in their
lives, this was great. BUT, if a religion said
that you should strap a bomb to yourself and
kill many innocent people then shouldn’t you
question that religion and what it stood for
in your life?
As Christians, we have some things in our
past we should look at; the Crusades, the
Inquisition, etc., before we judge. But, we
have learned from history and have become
more moderate in our understanding of others. I have tried to think what God must feel
when he sees His creation doing these acts
of violence and killing one another and using
Him as their excuse. When in a hundred
or a thousand years, historians look back at
this age, what will they see? Once again, they
will see how religion has put another blight
onto the pages of humanity’s history and
mankind will not have learned anything of
value from the religions they have practiced
except to pick and choose those tenets that
back their personal beliefs for power or control over others. What a waste of such beautiful writings by prophets, priests and scholars who have been usurped of the wisdom
and knowledge they tried to convey to man
to enrich his spiritual life throughout the
ages. Maybe, just maybe God will forgive ALL
those whose actions in HIS name left these
indelible stains on mankind’s history. 4
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The Evangelist
leading the discussion: Professor Norman Cornett (left).
will include a conversation with the movie’s
director Guillaume Tremblay led by Professor Norman Cornett. The film is in French
with very fine English subtitles.
I met Dr. Cornett this week to talk about
On Guillaume Tremblay’s new film,
the film, his approach to the discussion, and
L’heureux naufrage and its
himself. He is known to many of us and has
forthcoming premiere
organized recent events in our church. I first
Peter Harper
met him in the late 1990s when I attended his
n Monday, September 22 at 7 PM, course on Canadian Church History at the
St. John’s will be hosting the Eng- Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill. Born
lish language World Premiere of in Texas, he did work at Berkeley on “The
the film L’heureux naufrage. The evening Representation of Catholic Priests in French
at the movies
FORTUNATE
SHIPWRECK
O
october 2014
Novels of the Romantic Era”. At McGill, he
was researching the improbable topic of “The
Role of Religion in Lionel Groulx’s Nationalist Thought” for his Ph.D. (2002). I found
his course unusual, fascinating and challenging—for our term paper, he required a
essay based on original data, not the usual
copy-paste secondary sources ingenious collage. He had us visit religious sites for firsthand experiences. His teaching continued
to build on these premises, but he was soon
dubbed a controversial and unorthodox lecturer. He has a great love for Québec and is
much interested in the artistic world and its
spiritual dimension. He holds that “the arts
create a transitional space between the material and the spiritual realms so that aesthetics constitute the threshold of spirituality.”
You would think that he was a high church
Anglican. Over the years he has developed
a method which he calls “community education” through “dialogic” sessions in which
people of various classes are brought to meet
an artist and his/her work and to enter into
dialogue; he defines his seminars as “employing the dialogic philosophy of education to
delve into the world of the arts.” He has been
organizing such sessions throughout North
America and Europe, as he intends to do here
for us. For more information, see haveyouexperienced.wordpress.com
Are you bewildered by the post-Christian Québécois society in which you live?
Have you despaired of it ever regaining its
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spiritual dimension? Do you wonder how
young francophones react to the massive
rejection of Catholicism by their parents,
and their essentially materialistic upbringing? The film L’heureux naufrage (Fortunate Shipwreck) will give you insights on all
these questions. It was produced by a young
Québécois movie director Guillaume Tremblay and is to be presented at the Montreal
Film Festival. It is about spiritual values in
Quebec society—do not fear, it has nothing to do with the infamous Charter of Values debate of the last year! It is about the
void left in our midst by the loss of the once
pervasive Catholic Church; it is about faith,
about doubt, about the excesses of the past,
the quest of meaning of the present, and
the hope for the future. It is a multi-level
film. Underlying the story is the journey of a
young man from his dissatisfaction with the
organized religion of his parents, his voyage
through the desert of an increasingly meaningless world, and the search of values as he
wonders what he will transmit to his own
son. This is presented tastefully by a series
of animations that form the basic framework
and direction of the work.
Overlying this is an illustration both
from images and films of this present reality
of Québécois society. This is even brought
forth more poignantly by songs by various
local songwriters (Ariane Moffatt, Stéphane
Archambault, Jonathan Painchaud . . .) highlighting emptiness, despair, faith, and hope.
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The Evangelist
On a third level, short interviews are
given by writers and thinkers of various
stripes well-known in Quebec society on the
same topics: Benoit Lacroix o.p., film makers (Denys Arcand, Bernard Émond, Denis
Villeneuve . . .), students of society and religion ( Jacques Grand’Maison, Guy Durand,
Solange Lebebvre, Rose Dufour . . .), writers,
journalists and essayists (Fred Pellerin, Alain
Crevier, Guy Corneau, Denise Bombardier,
Stéphane Laporte, Pierre Maisonneuve, LéoPaul Lauzon . . .), and others (Ginette Reno).
On a top level, interviews with European philosophers, thinkers and writers
widely read and respected in our society
(André Comte-Sponville, Frédérick Lenoir,
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Jean-Claude Guillebauld) show that the phenomenon is not
limited to Québec, but affects all Western
civilization.
The four levels of communication are
ingenuously intertwined throughout the film
adroitly combining animation, film, pictures,
song and discourse in an effective mosaic that
reviews the past, analyzes the present and
looks towards the future. From the personal,
to the collective, to the universal.
I was given a preview of the nearly completed film (less than one hour) and I can
assure you that it opened perspectives that I
had not anticipated. It is a very serious film—
just look at the array of people who agreed
to participate. For most of us it is a wonderful opportunity to bridge the two solitudes
among which we live. And you will get a
unique opportunity to discuss these issues
that are dear to us in dialogue with the young
film-maker himself under the guidance of
a seasoned animator. The paradoxical title
alone should convince you of the originality
of the undertaking. 4
L’heureux naufrage premieres Monday, September 22 at 7 PM at St. John’s. Tickets are $5
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Tony Whitehead, Senior Editor
Kieran Wilson & Roland Hui, Assistant Editors
Carolyn Roper, Art director, Brian Morgan, guest art director for this issue
The Evangelist is published by
The Church of St. John the Evangelist
137 President Kennedy Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, H2X 3P6
redroof.ca • facebook.com/redroof.ca • [email protected] • 514-288-4428
The Reverend Keith A. Schmidt, Rector