Joshua Stafford guides the congregation to join the Chautauqua Choir in a hymn during a Sacred Song Service July 28 in the Amphitheater.
Rebecca Richmond, a Chautauqua writer and one of the founders of the Sandwich Poets at Chautauqua — a precursor to the Chautauqua Literary Arts program of today — in her 1944 poem “To Chautauqua – Moment of Farewell,” wrote: “Sometimes I wish that I would love you less, For when the summer ends and I must go, Almost it is a rending of the soul – You are part of me and I of you.”
It is that love of Chautauqua that feeds many people during the winter and fuels the excitement of arriving on the grounds as the season begins. The Chautauqua Assembly begins and ends with tradition. The Sunday evening Sacred Song Service is part of that tradition.
At 8 p.m. Sunday, the final Sacred Song Service of the summer will be held in the Amphitheater. The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor for Chautauqua, will preside. Melissa Spas, vice president for religion, will be the reader.
The Chautauqua Choir will sing under the direction of Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, accompanied by Rees Taylor Roberts, 2024 organ scholar. Stafford creates each Sacred Song Service during the summer season.
Like the first Sacred Song Service of the season, the Sunday evening service will be based on the 1903 Chautauqua Hymnal and Liturgy. A prayer by Thomas A. Kempis will be read as a litany. A statement by Lewis Miller, co-founder of Chautauqua from the introduction to John Heyl Vincent’s book The Chautauqua Movement reminds readers that Chautauqua was founded to be all-denominational and universal as to creeds.
The music in the service, from the opening “Day is Dying in the West,” to closing “Now the Day is Over,” and “Largo,” will also include the hymn “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” written by WIlliam F. Sherwin and Mary Lathbury for Chautauqua in 1877.
Immediately after “Largo,” Michael E. Hill, the 18th president of Chautauqua Institution, will give the Three Taps of the Gavel address to close the 150th sesquicentennial season of Chautauqua. The title of his speech is “Sabbath, Shabbat and Sabbatical: A Recipe for the Next 150 Years.”
