Religion: Culture at St. Matthew’s

At one end of the neo-Gothic transept, Sculptor Henry Moore’s outsize figure of the Madonna & Child sat tranquil and serene. At the other hung Painter Graham Sutherland’s agonized Christ on the Cross, bearing the sins and degradation of the world. Between them, in the center aisle, stood full-throated Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, singing Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner. The audience, warned not to applaud in the church, sat in pent-up enthusiasm which mounted from song to song, until at last, when Flagstad made her final bow, some 20 of her listeners jumped to their feet and silently bowed too.

This all happened last fortnight in a real church—and what’s more, a Church of England church: St. Matthew’s, in the little British shoe-manufacturing town of Northampton.

Absolutely Topnotch. It all began in 1943, when dynamic Parson Walter Hussey, 38, was planning jubilee celebrations for his church’s 50th anniversary. Says he: “I decided we’d have really absolutely topnotch performances of music and art —so why not approach the people at the very top of the tree? They could only refuse, and that wouldn’t hurt me.” When his father, Canon Hussey, who had been St. Matthew’s first vicar, offered to make a jubilee presentation to the church, Hussey hurried off to see Sculptor Moore, whose smooth, tiny-headed figures are considered by some critics to be tops in modern British art. Moore was dubious about making “the Madonna still look like the Madonna and something done by Henry Moore at the ‘same time.” “But,” said he resolutely, “it was a definite challenge to be asked to provide something for the community, and I felt I had to meet it.”

To provide music, Hussey asked Britain’s Benjamin Britten, composer of dissonant operas (Peter Grimes, Rape of Lucretia), to write a cantata to words from 18th Century Poet Christopher Smart’s poem, Rejoice in the Lamb. Composer Michael Tippett wrote a special Fanfare for the occasion, which was considered most impressive when perspiringly played in the church’s gallery by -the Northamptonshire Regimental Band.

This jolting dose of culture was such a hit with St. Matthew’s plain parishioners that Parson Hussey decided to do it every year. Each St. Matthew’s Day (Sept. 21) he commissions at least one new work, like Sutherland’s Crucifixion. The congregation raises the funds.

Unhealthy Titillations. Says Parson Hussey: “Artists are looking for firmer spiritual guidance in their work, and working for the church provides them with the kind of inspiration and background they need. Through works of art man probably reaches the highest achievement of which he is capable, and so such works are surely the most appropriate offerings to God.” Art as an aid to devotion seems to him quite secondary: “I don’t believe in providing worshipers with emotional titillations. I think it’s a very unhealthy idea. But it’s true that, as they have grown to understand them, many of the congregation have found the Moore and Sutherland works very comforting and inspiring.”

His own congregation has backed him almost to a man. And many modern Christians would welcome the special Litany for St. Matthew’s Day written by Poet W. H. Auden.* Excerpts:

“Let us pray especially, therefore, at this time, for all who, like our patron saint, the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, occupy positions of petty and unpopular authority, through whose persons we suffer the impersonal discipline of the state, for all who must inspect and cross-question, for all who issue permits and enforce restrictions. Deliver them from their peculiar temptations, that they may not come to regard the written word or the statistical figure as more real than flesh and blood. . . . And deliver us, as private citizens, from confusing the office with the man . . . and from forgetting that it is our impatience and indolence, our own abuse and terror of freedom, our own injustice that creates the state to be a punishment and a remedy for sin.

“Deliver us, we pray Thee, in our pleasure and in our pain, in our hour of elation and our hour of wan hope, from insolence and envy, from pride in our virtue, from fear of public opinion, from the craving to be amusing at all costs, and from the temptation to pray, if we pray at all: ‘I thank Thee, Lord, that I am an interesting sinner and not as this Pharisee.’ “*

* For other news of Poet Auden, see BOOKS.

* Quoted by author’s permission.