God creates life; life beholds beauty; beauty begets love; love is the life of God.” — Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 AD)
Last month my son and I attended a service at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The spectacular design and energizing worship service showcased its namesake’s love of life, centered on dance.
We met in an airy rotunda, surrounded by 99 icons frescoed high on the walls. After mingling for a few minutes, the congregation gradually coalesced into a conga line. We slowly danced a few dozen feet into the sanctuary.
The service mirrored Gregory of Nyssa’s remarkable 4th century vision of joyful social living. The liturgy was sung, with the whole congregation forming the choir.
The Rev. Canon Dr. Stephanie Spellers was the visiting clergy that morning, hailing from St. Bartholomew’s in New York City.
Rev. Spellers’ sermon was based on Saint Matthew’s story of the Canaanite woman. The desperate mother was not an Israelite, whom Jesus felt called to serve. She approached him nonetheless, demanding that he heal her child.
Even after Jesus spurned her, she asked – and was finally granted – her request, insisting, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”
Rev. Spellers posited that in the brief interaction, “[Jesus] changed the breadth of His own call that day, because a brave woman came for a brave conversation.”
The sermon was a seamless fit for a congregation built on Gregory’s visionary ideas.
Saint Gregory was a “highly original and sophisticated thinker,” who is remembered for advancing philosophical and ecclesiastical ideas in several ways.
He is known for being the first person in recorded history to have written against all forms of slavery, declaring the institution sinful.
He also was one of the first theologians to argue that God is infinite, suggesting that God should be defined in terms of what God isn’t, rather than attempting to contemplate who God is.
Gregory argued for Christian universalism, declaring in his writings that, “no being will remain outside the number of the saved” and that “no being created by God will fall outside the Kingdom of God”.
In conceiving the sanctuary design, iconographer Mark Dukes placed Gregory in the bright, broad cupola among other saints across time and around the globe.
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintos and Pagans are recognized for their contributions as musicians, organizers, missionaries, soldiers, judges, and more.
The common thread in the saints is acknowledging those who crossed boundaries in ways that unified humanity, sometimes at the cost of their own life. Some lived virtuous lives throughout their time on earth while others’ deeds transformed their life’s path toward the end.
Many of the saints were previously unknown to me, but I recognized a host of historical luminaries.
There were obvious choices like Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, and Desmond Tutu. Others, such as Charles Darwin and John Coltrane, were surprises, eliciting my desire to learn more about them.
I would have liked to find our recently deceased luminaries, Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton. Perhaps they’ll make a future addition.
At the end of the service, we reshaped the conga line, returning to the rotunda of the dancing saints for coffee and snacks.
Gregory explains the logic for his age and ours: “Once there was a time when the whole rational creation formed a single dancing chorus looking upward to the one leader of this dance. And the harmony of motion that they learned from his law found its way into their dancing.”