O Beautiful

"I am a Catholic Futurist, not tied to any age," said an aging but still voluble divine in Manhattan last week. The Rev. Dr. William Norman Guthrie, 69, was retiring after 26 years of service at the Episcopal Church of St. Marks-in-The Bouwerie on the lower East Side.

Last Sunday Dr. Guthrie bade St. Marks good-by with a tour of its grounds, which date from 1660, when Peter Stuyvesant worshipped there, later to be buried in the churchyard, in which Rector Guthrie still later kept a pair of peafowl. Two Sundays ago in his sermon Dr. Guthrie paid his respects to Bishop William Thomas Manning with whom he had often clashed--"with him came the bigness of head that goes with new office"--and to the Episcopal Church into which he was born: "I don't know any church I could stand as well. It was organized by gentlemen for gentlemen, and you can break the law if you know how."

This was in many ways the keynote of Dr. Guthrie's career, for he has always been more of an artist than a theologian (for some years he was an itinerant lecturer on literature), and as much of an individualist as an artist. Because the life tenure of an Episcopalian rector can be terminated only for grave cause, and because he was careful never to set down any of his indiscreet utterances in print, he weathered all the storms that blew around his bushy locks.

Last week, with the need for discretion terminated, Churchman Guthrie with his penetrating eyes twinkling beneath his feral eyebrows, told a reporter: "There is no God. There never was." This he proceeded to qualify in the veiled words which had made him, if not the greatest U. S. religious mystic, at least a mystic who got himself thoroughly talked about in the press. For St. Marks, most of whose socialite parishioners long ago moved to more fashionable districts, Dr. Guthrie feared the fate of certain London churches which he said are obliged to pay people to attend worship. He delved in the mysteries of non-Christian worship, had Parsees, Chinese, Amerindians conduct their rituals in his church. He invited people like Dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, Poet Amy Lowell, Actresses Helen Menken and Eva Le Gallienne, Astrologist Evangeline Adams, to speak at afternoon or evening services. But when, on St. Nicholas Eve in 1923, Dr. Guthrie had six bare-legged but amply-clad Barnard College girls perform eurythmic dances in St. Marks, austere Bishop Manning blew up. He cut off St. Marks from his episcopal visiting list, so that its people had to go elsewhere to be confirmed--until 1932, when the church discontinued its dances for lack of money.

Dr. Guthrie, who relished the dramatic, including the Bishop's helpless wrath, filled his services with incense, colored lights, gongs and other cinematic musical effects. Typical was his "Dithyrambic Invocation and Adoration of the Christ in Us," a liturgical invention (based on works by Arthur Edward Waite) in which a cantor and choir assisted sonorous-voiced Dr. Guthrie in passages like the following:

Cantor: Hark! Out of the deep . . . Dark . . . Inner vast . . . Gulf of carnal sleep . . . Full, fast . . . Thou up-wellest . . . One . . . As on a sea . . . Remote! . . . No Thee . . . And Thine . . . Ineffable, lavished . . . Zest . . . In ravished . . . Rest . . . Divine! (Soft shudder of great gong.)

Choir: Alpha and Omega--Om! (Silence. Deep Chinese bell.)

Cantor: O Lotus, lifting out of the noisome coze!

Dr. Guthrie: Floating milky white, rosy-hued or sky blue . . .

Choir and People: O valiant and true Hearken, hearken; O virtuous, O beautiful, Hearken!

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