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Reflection for April 16 2006

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My earliest memories of a parish are of St. Ludwig's in the Brewerytown section of North Philadelphia - an old German neighborhood that was beginning to go downhill with the influx of the Irish. Indeed, my mother had to swear (falsely) that I had German blood in my veins to gain me admission to St. Ludwig's school. This was back in the 1930's and living on first impressions as I did back then I thought St. Ludwig's church was old. Actually it was only about forty years old - just about as old then as St. Leo's is today. But it looked old what with its gothic tower and portal and vaulted nave and arched stained glass windows and ornate sanctuary - in other words, its imitation of those centuries' old churches of northern Europe.

Needless to say, I was impressed by this relic of what people call the Age of Faith. It offered me a refuge, what with its color and ethereal space and those old German hymns we sang - like Johann Sebastian Bach's choral piece: O sacred head sore wounded, / Defiled and put to scorn; / O kingly head surrounded / With mocking crown of thorn: / What sorrow mars thy grandeur? / Can death thy bloom deflower? / O countenance whose splendor / The hosts of heav'n adore! I can hear it still rising from the voices of my schoolmates during Lent - the boys in the pews on one side of the aisle, the girls on the other - German style. The place - in my youthful inexperience of time - seemed eternal to me, a place of permanent peace in an otherwise noisy neighborhood. And I retained it in my memory just as it was over all the subsequent years of my life. It remained for me a foothold upon a reality more real than the news of the day.

Until - one day forty years later I returned to the old neighborhood and found it had changed from its lower middle class status of the thirties to a poor neighborhood badly maintained by absentee landlords. And St. Ludwig's? Well it was still in fair shape as a place of worship owned by an evangelical group - but without its stained glass windows or school or convent. I took that in stride. After all, the old population had left and it was inevitable the Archdiocese should hand it over to a resident tradition. But then I returned again only a few years ago and now St. Ludwig's was empty, boarded up, wire screening over its windows, the front doors off their hinges. It seemed destined for the wrecking ball. Once listed as an architectural gem, its rose window had gone vacant, its tower leaning as if ready to lie down amid empty stores and boarded houses - to die.

Sad as I might be over the rapid decline of my childhood haven, my first experience of God's kingdom, I take consolation from today's Gospel in which Jesus can refer to his own body as a temple and predict its capacity to outlast decay as no man-made temple ever has. And I'm consoled by those other passages in the New Testament where we're reminded that our bodies are temples of God or that describe us as "living stones" of a temple founded upon Christ as its cornerstone!

Which makes me think: there's no need for me to make another nostalgic visit to the site of old St. Ludwig's - which is probably now a vacant lot. For I am St. Ludwig's! Its whole purpose as a place of worship was to make of me a living stone of a far greater Temple not subject to the transience of time or place. And it left me and my long gone schoolmates retaining our experience of St. Ludwig's and thereby serving now ourselves as stained glass windows wherever we go to let the radiance and justice of God and the story of Jesus shine through us. I am St. Ludwig's, a living residue of it, soon to be gathered with all of its other living stones and to be reassembled in the hereafter - where it will be Brewerytown all over again - except celestial - and we can all go back to school again and sing Bach and grow and grow and grow forever and ever.

-- Geoff Wood