By Anne W Semmes
Last Sunday evening Christ Church Greenwich, in its 275th anniversary year, launched a new “Contemporary Eucharist Worship Service” in its second-floor arch-windowed Loft, featuring the contemporary music of Greenwich native and renowned musician Rob Mathes. At starting time of 5 p.m. all 190 seats were taken, with over 60 being turned away.
“This is a trial run of something we plan to feature either every Sunday or every other Sunday, depending on how much support and enthusiasm we get behind us,” began Rev. Marek Zabriskie, “This is kind of a cool place to gather to worship and we’re going to be able to experiment with what we do here to see how it works.”
What those attendees witnessed, including the parents of Rob Mathes sitting front row near Chuck Royce, a longtime supporter of Christ Church, was heartfelt singing and sharing of personal stories. “Christ Church has been the center of so many extraordinary things for me in my life,” shared Mathes. “I saw my mom and dad play with the Greenwich Symphony behind the Greenwich Choral Society in that sanctuary when I was a little boy. And Maya Angelou came there, and I did some arrangements of her favorite spirituals in that sanctuary, and we played with Mavis Staples in that sanctuary.”
He addressed “the beauty” of the Christ Church tradition in its “incredible Anglican music – to hear Jamie Hitel [Director of Music] play the organ is a gift,” and in “listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Amazing Grace’ record,” he sees no “contradiction at all.” He then introduced a song he wrote “that actually uses old hymn texts- ‘Lead Kindly Light.’” “Now just sing with us,” he invited, “You’ll learn this pretty quickly. And it is known that for 3000 years before Christ people have been singing to God – there’s something about communicating our love, our joy, our awe, our faith, the wonder of creation in singing to God.”
Zabriskie in Blue Jeans
Rev. Zabriskie took the “stage” in his jeans and colorful vestment after his young assisting Rev. Tim Hamlin read a passage from Mark’s Gospel, and in great depth spelled out that Gospel scene in the Holy Land Zabriskie has visited often, then embarked upon its characters, with their issues as reflected amongst ourselves. “Each one of you has this beautiful identity,” he said, looking around the Loft. “You’re like a poem waiting to be read aloud and there’s no one who’s like that poem but you, so live into it. Cherish what makes you unique and expend yourself by giving yourself to others. And don’t be afraid to share that deepest part of your identity. Its holy and it’s good. And the world is waiting to discover it.”
Post communion music man Mathes introduced a moving song about thankfulness called “Consider It Joy” written after he traveled to Rwanda years ago. He spoke of seeing “the most joyous people that ever lived though consumed by poverty.” A verse he had everyone singing was, “I have seen the sorrowful/weak with battle scars/In the morning count their blessings/In the evening count the stars.”
Zabriskie shared after the service what had brought forth this new contemporary service in a centuries old traditional Episcopalian church. He had it in mind since leaving his last post in Pennsylvania five plus years ago. “At 5:00 we had a Sunday service called Faith at Five,” and he’d read “that something like 27 percent of the American adult population has a work conflict with Sunday morning.” Add those youth sports and “John or Suzy is on a travel soccer team and we’re going to be out of town most Sunday mornings or playing a game here in town.” Or there’s folks who “just don’t like to get dressed up for church and Sunday morning tends to be a little more formal…but if he can come in blue jeans or my wife can, then we’d do it.” So, bring on that “more informal based service.”
Zabriskie on Mathes – Mathes on Zabriskie
Zabriskie had attended Mathes’ long running Christmas concert in SUNY Purchase this past year. “Rob has a huge reputation and is just unparalleled with his musical gifts,” he noted.
Performing with Mathes at the contemporary service was soloist and violinist Anna Leinbach Jacobson, who grew up in Christ Church as a chorister. “So, we have Anna who’s helping to participate with Rob, and she will be leading services and organizing them the Sundays when he’s not here. And she’s going to help us reach younger folks as well. And that’s one key reason why we brought Tim Hamlin on board, who’s 32, to be a younger voice among us and a younger face.”
Zabriskie spoke of the disappointment having to turn away over 60 people, especially “younger people and families with children and teenagers…So we’re just going to move the service with Rob and experiment with the Parish Hall and with the sanctuary itself because we need a bigger venue. We don’t want to have to turn people away. But on the other nights we’ll do the Loft, for the Sundays when Rob’s not doing it. So, we’re feeling our way.”
“Marek is an incredibly lovely and kind and good man, who really sees Christ Church as a place where he wants people to feel welcomed and warm as a spiritual home for people in this area,” weighed in Mathes. “It’s always been the shining example of a dignified, beautiful, Episcopal tradition. It’s always been the best place to spend Christmas Eve and Easter morning if you want to just hear extraordinary choral music and hear a sermon that’s beautifully rendered and really takes you into the majesty of what you can only get from great Anglican choral music and the book of Common Prayer. But I think Marek wanted to widen the scope of what the church does.”
Mathes Addresses His Different Seasons
Mathes cited Chuck Royce as recommending him to Zabriskie. “I wrote a 90-minute Cantata for singers and orchestra that we performed twice at Christ Church in 2010,” said Mathes. “And Chuck supported that when we did the Maya Angelou evening, and the evening with Mavis Staples.” And this contemporary venue comes easy with Mathes having served other churches in town, especially Trinity. “Trinity’s got three services they do now, one in Greenwich, one in Darien, and one in Westchester,” he told. “It’s a brilliant church, but it’s a different church. It’s perhaps a more conservative church, a more traditional evangelical church in a way…but it was just a different season.” He’d moved on working with Sting and Bruce Springsteen and did his final years of musically directing the Kennedy Center Honors. “But the Kennedy Center is now done by the people that produced the Tony Awards, and it’s a different team.” So, again, “Everything has its season.”
He identifies as a dear friend the guitarist Sean Witty who’d played at the contemporary service. Witty had served as assistant pastor at Trinity. “And Sean and I have both remarked on the fact that when you’re in your 30s and 40s, you make the terrible mistake of assuming that these wonderful moments in your life are just going to continue forever. I’ve got a wry smile about all that now. I realize that when you turn 60 you realize that all these seasons are seasons. They don’t go on forever.”
But one constant in Mathes’ life is, “I felt closest to God in my life, uniformly,” he said, “when I’ve been in the presence of great music, be that music one of the late Beatles records, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. So even though I consider myself a misfit, what you saw me do yesterday, this bluesy gospel music, dealing with issues of doubt, and faith, and hope, and joy, and sorrow, and belief, and disbelief, and how it all mixes together in the modern world, spiritual music that deals with the life of Christ and a lot of those messages around it, that’s where I live. That’s me at my best. And when I talked to Marek and to the vestry, I said, ‘Look, all I can do is what I do.’ So, what they do with the contemporary service in and around the one Sunday I’ll do a month, it’s on them. But what I’ve committed to do is what you saw last night.”
