The Weight Of Silence
 

 

The wood beneath the pew creaked when I knelt, the sound an old kirk back home would make on a winter morning.

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Warm darkness wrapped around me, broken only by the glow of electric candles and the faint wash of lights above the first pew.

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The ceiling of St. Mary’s on 5th and H soared overhead, its vaulting held aloft by faux-marble columns doing their best to look Italian.

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The place was quiet. Too quiet.

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The sort of quiet that suggests a building knows something you don’t but intends to reveal it only when the moment suits.

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I sat back and let the silence settle onto my shoulders.

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Washington is not a city I think of as holy. It is marble monuments and people striding about as though history might collapse if they stop moving.

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Yet here, inside this small sanctuary, time eased its grip.

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The hush coaxed reverence without demanding it. Like tidewater curling around your ankles.

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Minutes passed. No one entered.

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A Scot is accustomed to arriving early for Mass, but even this felt unusual.

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Still, I remained.

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I listened to the room.

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To my breathing.

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To whatever truth might rise from the shadows.

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Then the pipe organ sounded.

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One low solemn swell filled the nave and my chest along with it.

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The note faded slowly back into silence.

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My watch must have been fast, I thought.

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Ach well. The solitude suited me.

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“Excuse me, sir.” The voice drifted from the back of the church.

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A man stood there holding a ladder as though it might bolt.

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“Could you hold this steady?” he asked.

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“Aye, of course.”

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He positioned the ladder beneath an unremarkable clock above the entrance.

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“Every year somebody forgets to set it back,” he said. “I’d rather not have it fall on anyone’s head.”

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So that explained the empty church.

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Providence. Or Washington’s version of it.

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When he climbed down, I asked how much of the place was original.

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He groaned softly and smiled.

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“I wish you hadn’t asked. I tend to get carried away.”

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What followed was a forty-five-minute personal tour of St. Mary’s in Chinatown conducted by Don, organist, caretaker, historian, and guardian spirit of the place.

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He spoke about the church the way men speak about family.

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The original chapel, he explained, still stood in the basement, its stone walls rough as a fisherman’s hands.

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The current church had risen partly from its own rubble.

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He told stories of priests long gone. One had removed the small crosses above the Stations of the Cross, which Don quietly restored once the man moved on.

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Another priest, careless and unpopular, had left the parish deep in debt.

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Don spent years restoring the massive pipe organ without ever taking a penny.

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Not for praise. Simply because he loved it.

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We passed towering angels beside the altar and smaller kneeling ones Don had bartered for through one of his many trades.....