Changing City

1967, A Stunning Announcement

DEAN KOWALSKI The Civil Rights movement was the real test of faith in our time. We were marching, and the Church was trying to catch up. The Church was fighting itself about what position to take—either embracing civil rights or not.

THE REV. CANON TOM MILLER In the decade of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, and civil rights marches, many people and groups were struggling to maintain a balance between attempting to draw strength from their ties with the traditional institutions from which these movements had sprung and, at the same time, to shake up and destabilize those same institutions.

THE REV. TOM PIKE I was ordained at the Cathedral in 1963. I began my ministry feeling that justice was a legitimate concern for the religious community. I was adamantly committed to social justice as the reasonable expression of religious commitment. When Dr. King came out against the war in Vietnam, I remember being very nervous that he was confusing things— and that opposition to the war was going to dilute the Civil Rights movement. But I slowly began to realize that Dr. King was on target. That addressing this issue of the war was central to the soul and life of America. I moved as a parish priest from my opposition to racism to an opposition to the war in Vietnam. And I was not alone. People were marching and getting arrested. There was a lot of turmoil. Many people resented what the activists were doing. One of my star acolytes was killed in Vietnam. The funeral was held at my church. I think if the soldiers who came to that funeral had had loaded rifles they would have shot me right there in my own church.

HONOR MOORE We were taken to demonstrations as children, but just my brother Paul went to the 1963 Jobs and Freedom March in Washington. My father had been in Mississippi, and he’d been around the Klan, the gunfire, and feared the violence. He had nine children and he didn’t want to be careless.

PAMELA MORTON Selma changed everything. We used to bring our children to protests, but we never expected to be attacked. In 1965, the Selma kids were brutally beaten, and there was an immediate response. Selma was important. I would say very, very important.

DEAN MORTON When we got the message about Selma, we just said, “Let’s go.” In hindsight, it was so decisive. We were there with Reverend Reeb, the Unitarian minister, the night he was shot. We got to know Dr. King and his staff in action. It was unforgettable. “During this long travail our ancestors spoke to us, and we listened, and we tried to make you hear life in our song but now it matters not at all to me whether you know what I am talking about— or not: I know why we are not blinded by your brightness, are able to see you, who cannot see us. I know why we are still here.”

JAMES BALDWIN, INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN POETS CORNER, 2011

WAYNE KEMPTON Segregation and discrimination were on the forefront of the national consciousness. Housing projects were falling apart. Unemployment was skyrocketing. Bishop Donegan had a plan to finish the Cathedral. He was in the embryonic stages of fundraising. But Donegan stopped the construction. Instead, he put money into street and storefront community organizations that were helping their own neighborhoods.

THE REV. TOM PIKE Bishop Donegan followed the old tradition of a Prince Bishop. He lived in the days when the Bishop had a chauffeur and was driven around from place to place. We joked about someone pulling a subway token out, and Bishop Donegan asking, “What’s that coin?” But in 1967 he made the stunning announcement that donations for finishing St. John the Divine would be given instead to housing and development projects in Harlem.

BISHOP HORACE WILLIAM BADEN DONEGAN We will not pour money into a building when our cities are burning. This unfinished Cathedral, towering as it does over our great and suffering metropolis, shall be the prophetic symbol that our society is still as rough-hewn, ragged, broken, and incomplete as the building itself.

Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan photographed with New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

The ’70s, the ’80s, and Then Some

Bishop Paul Moore and Dean James Parks Morton were a partnership for their time, an era that saw the coming of environmental awareness, ongoing Vietnam protests, agitation for nuclear disarmament, second-wave feminism, and the rise of Gay Pride—tempered in the fires of AIDS. It was an era that called for activist and creative clergy.

Everything was Happening

MARY JANE BROCK Jim Morton and Paul Moore really put that place on the map. It was a tumultuous time and they were the right team to embrace those conversations. Jim Morton was a master marketer; he knew all the players and most of them were his friends. There was a certain allure to Jim Morton’s Era.

THE REV. TOM PIKE When Paul Moore became Diocesan Bishop in 1972, it was pretty clear that things were going to be different. But nobody knew quite how different.

STEPHEN FACEY Paul Moore was one of the great liberal bishops. He had a real theological point of view, a focus about the Church being engaged. His preaching generated national interest.

THE REV. CANON TOM MILLER Moore, before becoming Bishop of New York, had served as Bishop Suffragan in Washington D.C., where he was close to the center of political power, had participated in public demonstrations, and grappled with the church’s ambivalence about taking politically controversial stands. Once elected Bishop of New York, Paul Moore— with his dynamic personality—became a forceful public advocate for peace and social justice and seemed determined that the Cathedral would be stage for civic engagement in its many forms by many means.

HONOR MOORE When he came to the Cathedral as Diocesan Bishop, my father had to contend with ministering to parishes as diverse as St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue and Reverend Bob Castle’s activist ministry in Harlem.

THE REV. TOM PIKE As Bishop, Paul Moore always thought his most creative action and perhaps his most extreme commitment to peace and civil rights was to appoint Jim Morton as Dean. Jim was a great gentleman and a great entrepreneur. He may not have been your ideal institutional figure, but he was a prophet. He drew people to him because he was so darn creative. Jim would dream things. DEAN MORTON When Paul Moore was elected Bishop of New York he asked me to consider being the Dean of St. John. He said, “This place is dead. It needs to be turned around, and I think you’re crazy enough to do it.”

PAMELA MORTON Jim wanted to create a contemporary Cathedral, a sacred place where all sorts of things could happen, where people came together that you didn’t necessarily find in a church. Jim was given a lot of freedom. It was a very exciting time.

DEAN MORTON The Cathedral came to life. The most extraordinary minds and spirits in the world began coming to the Cathedral because that’s what the Cathedral was supposed to be.

“The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, always larger than life and sometimes better.”

HOWARD E. QUIRK

THE REV. CANON JAY WEGMAN The dean of a cathedral needs the gift of a good imagination because you need to imagine what’s possible, you need to imagine new things.

STEVEN C. ROCKEFELLER It was in this spirit of experimental innovation that Dean Morton opened wide the doors of the Cathedral to the Morningside Heights community and the larger world. He found creative ways to link sacred Christian tradition and practice with contemporary needs and aspirations. For many thousands of people from diverse cultures and religious traditions, the Cathedral became a unique spiritual center where they could awaken to and celebrate the liberating and unifying sacred presence within themselves and in and through all things.

THE REV. CANON TOM MILLER The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the 1970s began a period of dynamic collaboration between religion and education, the arts, science, social awareness, and political advocacy.

A Place that Transformed Your World

Top Buckminster Fuller and the Cathedral's Green Team viewing Fuller's model for a proposed central tower.

“During Dean Morton’s tenure there had been several models for finishing the Cathedral.

Unbeknownst to most people, Buckminster Fuller did a model for completing the central tower.”

stephen facey

Bottom Swami Satchidananda, spiritual adviser to the Beatles and opening speaker at Woodstock in 1969, at the Cathedral with Dean Morton on St. Francis Day. WILLIAM BRYANT LOGAN Within a few months, the two men had given notice of the phenomenal energy that would propel the Cathedral into the national conscience. They were midwives of innovative self-help and outreach programs like the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, Homes for the Homeless, and Manhattan Valley Youth Outreach. They gathered artists of the stature of Leonard Bernstein, Paul Winter, Philippe Petit, Richard Westenberg, Godspell author John-Michael Tebelak, and poet Muriel Rukeyser. William Irwin Thompson and his Lindisfarne association began to function as a think-tank on the relations between the planet, society, and the divine, while visitors like the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu, ecologists Rene Dubos and James Lovelock, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Native American activist Vine DeLoria, UFW boss Cesar Chavez, and financial planner Felix Rohatyn all spoke from the pulpit.

PAMELA MORTON The people with the most interesting ideas were not always clergy. Jim invited everyone to preach from Al Gore to Whoopi Goldberg. The themes were always universal, like food or climate. There were several on water: there was a series of sermons on “Homelessness,” and “Earth’s Sacred Voyage.” Jim has a strong liturgical understanding so he would introduce the speakers by connecting them to the readings from the day expanding on the Gospel. And the visiting speakers were in awe of being in that pulpit. They were usually very reverent, I would say inspired.

DEAN MORTON Our Environmental Sundays gave St. John’s the name of “The Green Cathedral” and myself the “Green Dean.” Between 1975 and 1996, over 150 Green sermons were delivered by over 30 Green preachers: Mary Catherine Bateson, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, Buckminster Fuller, and others.

MADELEINE L’ENGLE A Green Cathedral meant that the Cathedral was concerned about what was happening in the city around it, in the United States, and on the planet. It meant we care about keeping the forests, that we care about pollution, the hole in the ozone layer, and that we take seriously God’s order that the people of God care for creation.

TOM HURWITZ Jim Morton never forgot this was still a church. Cathedral is an adjective; it modifies church, this was a Cathedral Church. It got very close to not being an Episcopal Church. But it was very, very much a church. The liturgy was ornate and gorgeous. Everything that the Cathedral stood for was deeply based in Christianity. Walking into this place was like walking into a holy mystery. It was walking into a place that transformed your world every time you went through the doors. “Worshippers wound through the cavernous Cathedral… on a recent Sunday, shaking tambourines, singing plainsong, and watching medieval mystery plays. In the basement, members of a mystical Islamic sect thumped their drums. Black feminists met in the Synod House.… Members of a Tai Chi workshop did oriental meditation exercises. These diverse activities reflect the changes that in recent months have given new life to one of New York’s best-known landmark institutions.”

TIME MAGAZINE

DEAN MORTON How could a 20th-century Episcopal Cathedral embrace the global diversity of New York? The jump-start came in 1974 when the United Nations and America’s oldest interfaith organization, The Temple of Understanding, together requested we host the 30th anniversary of the UN’s founding at the Cathedral. The event culminated with prayers by Mother Teresa and Hindu leader Sri Chinmoy. Our meeting UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim resulted in the Cathedral’s Annual October United Nations Sunday.

When the Dalai Lama made his first trip to America, his first public address was at the Cathedral on Sunday, October 14, 1979. With Philip Glass at the organ, thousands of New Yorkers queued up to meet him.

DIANNE DUBLER I remember being in a long, long line waiting for His Holiness’ blessing. We heard a commotion in the back and saw Andy Warhol and his entourage coming up the aisle. Andy stepped in front—cutting off everyone else, simply pushed his Polaroid in the Dalai Lama’s face, took a picture— with a flash—then walked away.