Gone to the Chapel

(Rockwell Kent's illustration, via the Plattsburg State Art Museum)

"Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets..."

Moby-Dick, The Chapel

I have wonderful, agreeable, intellectually curious and kind friends. Two such souls agreed that the finest way to spend the first Saturday of the New Year was to trek down to New Bedford and attend the New Bedford Whaling Museum's annual Moby-Dick Marathon. 

Because what could be more fun than 135 chapters, read aloud, in 25 hours? One of these dear friends said that she was happy to go, and happier to go with me, because it was like spending Christmas with a little kid, such was my particular and somewhat inexplicable joy at the adventure.

(We didn't stay for the whole show. Even I, at least as of yet, am not up to that sort of voyage.) 

However, we did manage to arrive just in time for the reading of Father Mapple's sermon at the Seaman’s Bethel. It was one of the pieces I most wanted to hear, and—as I am unlikely to find myself on the open ocean in a whaleboat ringed with a bower and nursery of sperm whales—one of my best-loved scenes of the book that I can easily access.

Being slightly younger and more easily mobile than much of the crowd attending the reading, my friends and I arrived, like Ishmael, before the sermon began. We looked around at the tablets on the wall—my personal favorite was one erected by the New Bedford Seafood Council and dedicated to "Port of New Bedford Fishermen Who Died at Sea." As it is likely that those lost at sea became seafood themselves for sharks—with their natures yet ungoberned towards the angelic—this commemoration pleased both my dark sense of humor and ecological justice. 

As the reader-Father Mapple-impersonator strode to and then climbed up the ship’s prow pulpit, I looked around the chapel. In most things, my sense of reverence comes from sharing and observing. I don’t haul the ladder up behind me to be alone with whatever is beautiful and holy—I keep doors and eyes open and look around at all that is. In churches, I look at people praying. At readings of beautiful books that are some sort of strangely holy totemic text for a peculiar strain of literati, I look around at who else is there—who are these shipmates of mine? It’s like meeting someone in the mountains—there is a similar hue of the heart that leads people to common ground, and even if it is unspoken, I believe in that undercurrent of connectivity between strangers at such times and in such places.

The sweetest thing in that chapel, as a saltier take on Jonah’s attempt to wiggle out of Destiny was delivered from the pulpit, was the number of people who had brought their own copies of Moby-Dick and were reading along. I counted six or seven different editions, not including e-readers and iPads. Some were frilled out with tabs and notes, some were newer, some had woodcuts, some had covers that looked like Jaws knockoffs, or gilt pages, or leathered spines like Ahab or Moby’s skin, or the plastic covers of a library book, and so on.

But for each person, the book and their own book, meant enough to bring along to the public, communal reading.

For someone who doesn’t subscribe to any official faith, I think a lot about the subject. I believe that we all have touchstones and talismans and any manner of objects and rituals to keep us going. Maybe we’re all steadfast islands and maybe we’re not, but it is in the interplay between individual and communal that there is something beautiful I believe in.

Next year, I want to bring a camera to New Bedford and ask to take pictures of people with their books, to learn why they brought their own Koran to Mecca, as it were.

Perhaps there is no articulable reason, but the act alone is beautiful enough to be noticed. And shining a little light on what we share, bridging the distance between our own islands of being, I think that this will in the end only make us all a little richer, as well as sweeten our own individuality. The sheepishly joyful noise as everyone in the chapel rumbled and shuffled our feet when instructed—becoming party to the text—makes me think we’d be even more gleeful together.