Chairs inside St. John the Divine, the world’s largest cathedral, are set up in a waiting area of Covid-19 testing. Photo by Ann Votaw.
Services at St. John the Divine are only online, even as much of the city’s events are now onsite.
Yet the cathedral is open for meditation and various tours. For $5, you can purchase a timed ticket to walk around and meditate, which I did two weeks ago in April. I was surprised to see a Covid-19 testing station under the massive vaulted ceiling. The man giving the tests looked bored and comical among the statues. So I sat down at his table and took a self-test.
It was a type of communion.
“Turn the swab 10 times this way,” he instructed me. “And now 10 times that way. Now do the other nostril with this swab.” The swabbing and the online instructions made me crazy. I felt like I was in the Book of Revelations.
I felt so small in the world’s largest cathedral, measured in terms of internal volume. In the Columbarium, a room of walls containing human ashes, I felt my heartbeat slow down. No one in this part of the church had died of Covid, according to the dates of birth and death on the walls. Yet I felt an important opportunity to reflect on a terrible year. Last April, St. John the Divine was set up as a field hospital with tents and hundred of beds. From what I understand from staff members, the cathedral’s setup was used as a triage area.
“Ambiguous loss” is a term that comes to mind. During the darkest times of the pandemic, I kept hearing it in reference to Covid. A line from a Sylvia Plath poem, memorialized in the American Poet’s Corner, floated around in my head here in the cathedral: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”
In March, I organized a small group of friends to take a vertical tour, all the way up to the roof. Tickets were $27 apiece. The stillness in the cathedral was otherworldly. I had taken this same tour two times before Covid. This was more intimate, as many tours and museums experiences are right now.
Related Read: Glamping on Governors Island: Hip meets wholesome
Related Read: Summer vacation during COVID-19 requires you to put on your travel face (mask)