Manhattan’s Divine Intervention

Unless you leave room for serendipity…how can the divine enter? ~Joseph Campbell

A few minutes one way or the other, heading south instead of north, a conversation, a distraction, a photo or lunch. There’s no good reason I stepped into St. Paul’s Chapel at that precise moment and not another. Filled to the brim – standing room only – I felt I’d stumbled in on a private event, a funeral perhaps. Not so, the man in a dark suit whispered back. You are perfectly welcome.

Crossing the threshold at 12:59 (not earlier, not later) was a flash of serendipity, a flourish of divine intervention, the kind that occurs every minute of every day all around the city. But then St. Paul’s, part of the Parish of Trinity Church and the oldest house of worship in Manhattan, is no stranger to miracles.

Bordering the east side of the World Trade Center Plaza, it remained unscathed – not a pane of glass broken nor foundation shaken – by the 9/11 attacks on the two towers. It is said that in the churchyard a large sycamore tree, in the line of the flying debris, bore the devastation. Torn to bits, it gave its life to protect the unity of the chapel, a sanctuary for huddled workers, the homeless and other tempest-tossed souls in the weeks that followed. In 2005, its stump and roots were cast in bronze by artist Steve Tobin and installed in the courtyard of Trinity Church near Ground Zero.

St. Paul’s earned its nickname The Little Chapel That Stood from the 2003 children’s book written by A.B. Curtiss and illustrated by Mirto Golino.

A solace to presidents, help to the poor, no one was ever turned away from its door.

An immigrant’s refuge, a sojourner’s peace, where hope is born and sorrows cease.

And then, oh unthinkable thought, they fell, one tower then the other.

They fell with a rush and they fell with a roar, the sky was blank where they’d been before.

The giants around it had come to a fall, but not the chapel of old St. Paul.

It was something of wonder, a symbol of grace, the steeple still there, not a brick out of place…

There were firemen’s shoes on the old iron fence, where they’d earlier hung them in haste quick and tense 

As they pulled on their boots and raced to the towers…climbing melting steel to flaming showers.

Oh such gallant men we did lose, who never came back to get those shoes.

Rescuers worked through the night and the day in the chapel they’d pause then go on their way. A hot cup of coffee something to eat here firemen, welders, policemen would meet. All would come to rest from their labour, volunteer, doctor, brother, neighbor.

I leaned back against the wall, closed my eyes and fell into the music, a reverie inhabited by Bach’s motets and cantatas and presented within a liturgical context. A devout Lutheran, Bach composed 200 cantatas using both sacred and secular texts. 

Turns out the concert I stumbled into is part of the Bach at One series, brought to life by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and Trinity Baroque Orchestra under the beneficence of principal conductor Julian Wachner. According to Wachner, this day’s program contained the most difficult music in the western canon performed by the finest brass musicians in North America, a number on period instruments of uncommon form. It would be some of the finest music sung and played in the city that day.

Ill-versed in classical music, it was like nothing I’d heard before: “a feast of beauty for the ears,” as Wachner described it, and an unexpected passage into a body of music I might have easily missed. 

I passed out of the chapel into the sunshine and jumble of Lower Manhattan, refreshed by an hour of aural meditation. How perfectly divine.

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For upcoming events at St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Wall Street click here.